Another Place

Regenerus achieved a major coup with its first-ever project – bringing the famous Another Place sculptures by Angel of the North artist Antony Gormley to Crosby beach.

Installed in July 2005, the ‘Iron Men’ have attracted 650,000 extra visitors to Sefton over the past decade and won a number of tourism and regeneration awards.

Another Place consists of 100 cast-iron, life-size figures spread out along three kilometres of the foreshore, stretching almost one kilometre out into the bay.

The statues – each one weighing 650 kilos – are made from casts of the artist’s own body and are all looking out to sea, staring at the horizon in silent expectation.

Contractors spent three weeks lifting the figures into place and driving them into the beach on three-metre-high foundation piles.

The work is seen as a poetic response to the individual and universal sentiments associated with emigration – sadness at leaving, but the hope of a new future in another place.

Another Place is being exhibited in the UK for the first time. It had previously been seen in Cuxhaven in Germany, Stavanger in Norway and De Panne in Belgium.

Each visitor experiences Another Place in a slightly different way depending on the state of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of day they are visiting. At particularly high tides all the figures are submerged.

According to Antony Gormley, Another Place harnesses the ebb and flow of the tide to explore man’s relationship with nature. He explained: “The coast is a good place to do this. Here time is tested by tide, architecture by the elements and the prevalence of sky seems to question the earth’s substance. In this work human life is tested against planetary time.

“This sculpture exposes to light and time the nakedness of a particular and peculiar body. It is no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships moving materials and manufactured things around the planet.”

Celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary of Another Place on Crosby beach took place in 2015. For more details click here