The Angel's silhouette is at the head of Team Valley is now rivals with the famous Tyne Bridge.
It is at a panoramic hilltop site which was chosen so that the sculpture would be clearly seen by more than 90,000 people that drive a day on the A1 - more than one person every second and by passengers on the East Coast main line from London to Edinburgh.
The site which was a former colliery pithead baths synonymous with Gateshead mining history, was re-claimed as a green landscape during the early 1990's.
The sculpture was designed by an internationally reowned sculptor Antony Gormley.
Antony Gormley OBE, who was born in 1950 and is at the forefront of a generation of celebrated younger British artists who emerged during the 1980's. He has exhibited work around the world and has major public works in the USA, Japan, Australia, Norway and Eire.
Public work in Britain can be seen in locations as diverse as the crypt at Winchester Cathedral and Birmingham city centre. In 1994 he won the prestigious Turner Prize and in 1997 was awarded the OBE for service to sculpture. He has exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Gallery, British Museum and the Henry Moore Sculpture Gallery in Leeds.
"People are always asking, why an angel? The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them. The angle has three functions - firstly a historic one to remind us that below this site coal miners worked in the dark for two hundred years, secondly to grasp hold of he future, expressing our transition from the industrial to the information age, and lastly to be a focus for our hopes and fears - a sculpture is an evolving thing."
Gormley said of the Angel: "The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound. When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now in the light, there is a celebration of this industry. The face will not have individual features. The effect of the piece is in the alertness, the awareness, of space and the gesture of the wings - they are not flat, they're about 3.5 degrees forward and give a sense of embrace. The most important thing is that this is a collaborative venture. We are evolving a collective work from the firms of the North East and the best engineers in the world."