A Hundred Iron Men Facing the Sea

Crosby Beach is famous for one thing, and it is not the beach. It is the hundred cast-iron figures standing across the tidal sand, looking out at Liverpool Bay, that Antony Gormley called Another Place. They are the reason a brutal working shoreline north of Liverpool became a destination, and the story of how they got there, and stayed, is more contested than the serene image suggests.

The Work

Another Place is 100 cast-iron figures, each a life-size cast taken from Antony Gormley's own body. Every one stands 189 centimeters tall and weighs around 650 kilograms; they were cast at the Hargreaves Foundry in Halifax and the Joseph and Jesse Siddons Foundry in West Bromwich. They are spread over two miles of tidal sand between Waterloo and Blundellsands, and they all face out to sea.

There is no arrangement to admire, no focal point, no plinth. The figures simply stand, identical and alone, at intervals along an enormous flat beach. One is a curiosity. A hundred, strung along two miles of wet sand under a wide grey sky, become something closer to a vigil, an idea about solitude and the horizon repeated until it stops being a sculpture and starts being a condition of the place.

The Tide as Collaborator

What sets the Crosby installation apart from a row of statues is that the sea takes part. Twice a day the tide ebbs and floods across the flats, and as it does the figures are uncovered and then drowned: the landward ones on dry sand, the seaward ones wading to the chest or vanishing entirely, then re-emerging hours later streaming with water. They corrode in the salt and grow beards of barnacles, slowly being absorbed into the marine life of the estuary rather than sitting on top of it. The work is never the same from one hour to the next. Its real timetable is the tide table.

Gormley Chose the Brutality

Gormley did not pick a beautiful beach. He picked this one for being the opposite, describing Crosby as "the opposite of pretty. It is terrific and brutal and is a working beach." The container ships moving along the Port of Liverpool channel, the wind off Liverpool Bay, the red-flag water, the sinking sand: these are not flaws the artwork overcomes, they are the conditions it depends on. The piece had travelled before reaching here, first installed at Cuxhaven in Germany in 1997, then shown in Norway and Belgium, but Crosby's harshness is what made it land.

Gormley was, by 2005, Britain's foremost maker of public sculpture, a Turner Prize winner whose Angel of the North had stood over Gateshead since 1998. The casting of his own body was already his signature; Another Place simply repeated that self-portrait a hundred times and handed it to the sea.

The Fight to Keep Them

The figures arrived on 1 July 2005 as a temporary installation, due to move on to New York. A local campaign formed to keep them, and it ran into real opposition. The most serious objection was not aesthetic but practical: a hundred iron figures planted in the tidal approaches to a major working port, on sands with a documented history of trapping and drowning people, were argued to be a hazard to navigation and to the public.

The resolution, on 7 March 2007, was a compromise rather than a victory for either side. The work was granted permanent status, but the plan moved 16 of the statues out of the most contentious positions and reduced the installation's footprint from 232 to 195 hectares. It is a textbook case of how a community keeps a celebrated artwork without waving away the danger it creates: you move the worst-placed figures, you post the warnings, and you accept those terms as the price of the rest. The men that remain stand there conditionally.

The Danger Is the Point

It would be dishonest to write about Another Place as pure serenity. Crosby is red-flagged, 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 slow drowning of the iron men so moving will cut off a living person who has waded out among them. The beauty and the hazard are the same fact seen from two angles. You cannot have the image of a man disappearing under the rising sea without the rising sea, and the rising sea does not distinguish between iron and flesh.

That is finally what makes Crosby worth the trip: not a pretty beach with statues on it, but a hundred copies of one man, facing the water, being taken and returned by it forever, on a shore honest enough to be dangerous.

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