Crosby Beach is the rare case where a single artwork did not decorate a place but redefined it. Before 2005 it was a brutal, red-flagged working beach on the approaches to the Port of Liverpool, the kind of coast people lived beside rather than visited. Then Antony Gormley put a hundred iron men on it, and it became one of the most visited and most photographed beaches in the north of England, without becoming any less brutal. The danger and the beauty arrived together and have never been separated.

The work. Another Place is 100 cast-iron figures, each a life-size cast taken from Gormley's own body, 189 centimeters tall and weighing around 650 kilograms, cast at foundries in Halifax and West Bromwich. They are spread across two miles of tidal sand between Waterloo and Blundellsands, and every one of them faces out to sea. There is no plinth, no arrangement to admire, no center; they simply stand, identical and solitary, looking at the horizon. The idea is fixed and the effect is cumulative: one iron man is a curiosity, a hundred strung along two miles of empty sand is something closer to a congregation, or a vigil.

The tide is part of the sculpture. What makes Another Place at Crosby different from a row of statues is that the sea is a participant. As the tide ebbs and floods twice a day, the figures are uncovered and then drowned, the landward ones standing on dry sand, the seaward ones wading to the chest or disappearing entirely, then re-emerging streaming with water hours later. They corrode in the salt and grow barnacles, slowly becoming part of the marine ecology rather than objects placed on top of it. The installation is never the same twice; the tide table is its real schedule.

It was meant to leave. Gormley had shown the piece before, at Cuxhaven in Germany in 1997 and then in Norway and Belgium, and when it arrived at Crosby on 1 July 2005 it was a temporary installation due to travel on to New York. A local campaign formed to keep it, and that campaign ran into serious objections, the gravest being that 100 iron figures planted in the tidal approaches to a major working port, on sands known to trap and drown people, posed a hazard to navigation and to the public. This was not nimbyism; it was a real safety question about a real working estuary.

The compromise that let them stay. On 7 March 2007 the work was made permanent, but not unchanged. The permission moved 16 of the statues out of the most contentious positions and reduced the installation's footprint from 232 to 195 hectares, a negotiated answer to the navigation and safety objections. It is a clean example of how public art and public risk get reconciled in practice: not by pretending the danger away, but by moving the most problematic figures and accepting warning signage as the price of keeping the rest. The men that remain stand there on terms.

The danger is not incidental. Crosby still carries a red-flag rating, and its quicksand has trapped numerous visitors over the years, a notable share of them while walking out past the safety point to reach the farther figures. The same incoming tide that makes the drowning of the iron men so affecting to watch will cut off a person who has waded out among them. The beauty of the piece is genuinely entangled with the hazard of the place; you cannot have the image of the man vanishing under the rising sea without the rising sea.

Why it matters. Most famous beaches are famous for being beautiful. Crosby is famous for being haunting, and it earned that on a coast its own creator called 'the opposite of pretty... terrific and brutal... a working beach.' Another Place works because Gormley refused a pretty site and let the tide, the wind off Liverpool Bay, the container ships, and the corroding iron do the work. It is a hundred copies of one man, looking at the sea, being slowly taken and given back by it, on a beach that will hurt you if you forget where you are. That is the whole of it, and it is enough.