On any given Sunday

It's a cloudy Sunday morning in Newcastle upon Tyne and we're not sure if it's going to rain as we head out to the quayside markets. After strolling through them to the Millennium Bridge and back, with more and more blue sky appearing, we decide to risk going further afield. We catch a Number 21 Angel bus out to outer edges of Gateshead to see the Angel of the North.

Sitting at the foot of the angel watching cloudscapes and crowdscapes, I wonder what it is that makes Antony Gormley's popular sculptures so appealing.

​They're accessible, I get that. You can touch them, put a satchel on the back of them, graffiti the feet of them. You don't have to pay gallery entrance fees and stand behind tape hung with unfriendly DO NOT TOUCH signs to view them. They're interactive, involving, inviting. Everyday people art.

They're understandable. They're recognisably human (albeit a little salt encrusted) or angelic (albeit kind of rusty industrial), and the artist's explanation of his work makes plain English sense.

Then it's the scope and scale of them. They're vast, as in 'Another Place', which stretches one-hundred strong across three miles of coastline. Or huge, as in the Angel of the North, the height of four double decker buses with a wingspan wider than a Boeing 767. They can't be ignored.

But beyond that, there's more. Something indefinable. I realise as we prepare to leave, that they have presence. They evoke an ineffable kind of yearning in me. In 'Another Place' it is for another place, another space, weirdly, for a home. Here at the angel, I'm held in the moment, transfixed beneath that looming figure while the three coach-loads of tourists swarming around the foot of it taking selfies (normally a huge irritation to me) make no impact at all.