10 years ago | Another Place, Crosby, Merseyside, UK | 8th March 2014

Ten years ago, we decided to fill a boring late winter weekend with a a few hours at a free local attraction – and realised we’d found somewhere amazing: Antony Gormley‘s Another Place, at Crosby Beach.

Gormley is most famous for Gateshead’s Angel Of The North but this installation, at Crosby since 2005, has become almost as well-known as being his work. If you want to visit, you can find out where it is and what’s nearby, here.

Five of us took a bracing walk around the figures, apparently all cast from Gormley’s own body. We messed about, took some pictures (some daft and some, like this one, a bit arty) and then we went to warm up at the nearby visitor centre for a brew and a cake. It didn’t feel like a trip to an art gallery and, to be totally honest, whatever artistic meaning we felt they might hold wasn’t really at the front of our minds while we were there. It was simply a focal point for us to gather and just be together, there.

And perhaps that’s all the artistic meaning it needs to have. Yes, there are metaphors about constancy, withstanding weather and tides, and yes it’s interesting to see the corrosion and the ways that nature is attempting to reclaim the iron figures but is that the bit that does that art is supposed to do – to lift the spirit? It exists merely as a place to visit, to escape to, somewhere to just be. That’s all we did and that’s all we needed to do for the memory of it to be so profound. We haven’t been back since – for no other reason than we’ve never got round to going – but I’d like to go there again, just to be there.

It’s easy to be quite blasé about this but it really is a world-class art installation on our doorstep, here in the North West.  It’s now as much a part of the Liverpool coastline as The Liver Building and The Albert Dock. You sense that if it was in the South East, it would be far more revered but, on reflection, that would seem like the last thing the artist would want for it. It’s in ‘another place’ for a reason.