ASTONISHING though it now seems, there was a time when I had never heard of Thomas Heatherwick. OK, I confess all. That time comprised my whole life until about six weeks ago. Doubtless there were also scribes in 15th-century Florence who uttered the blasé words “Who he?” whenever the name of Leonardo da Vinci came up.

But that was before I began to notice peculiar things happening to Britain. My epiphany started on Tyneside. Passing through central Newcastle last month I came across a whole square carpeted — there is no other word — with what seemed to be (and indeed was) blue glass. The whole thing was so impish and ingenious that I asked an arty Geordie who was responsible. “Oh, this bloke called Heatherwick,” came the reply. “Took him six years, apparently.”

I thought no more about it. But a few days later, coming out of Paddington station, I decided to take a look at the fancy new property development called Paddington Basin. All very cute, very high-tech, very predictable. Except for one bizarre sight. Over one part of the canal was a footbridge. A footbridge that had just magically curled up like a caterpillar — all 40ft of it, plus handrail — and tucked itself into a ball on one bank of the canal.

Intrigued, amused, entertained, I asked around. “Oh, that performing bridge at Paddington,” said an architect I know, with a lofty twitch of an eyebrow. “Thomas Heatherwick. Who else?” Then the very next day I was cycling down Euston Road, past the glinting new headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, which the Queen had just opened. As I pedalled along I glanced through the side window. The sight nearly made me topple off my bike. Inside the stairwell of the building, stretching from the ground floor to the sixth, was this vast, globulous object — shimmering ethereally in what seemed to be a permanent white mist, like a grounded UFO in some epic science-fiction movie.

It had been made, I later discovered, by dropping molten metal into cold water, laser-scanning the resultant shape, and then reproducing it by threading 150,000 glass beads on to one million metres of stainless steel wire. I hardly needed to ask who would be mad enough to think of that. Thomas Heatherwick, of course. The name was beginning to irritate.

In the days that followed, I started to acquire other tantalising nuggets about this infuriating fellow. It was said that he was currently dividing his time between building a new Buddhist temple on a mountain in Japan, creating a huge new Tube interchange on the Northern Line, devising a trendy new boutique in SoHo, New York, and redesigning Milton Keynes (all, as it turned out, true). He had definitely invented an expanding handbag fashioned entirely out of a zip (which, of course, had become a cult accessory among the truly trendy). And he had caused something of a sensation among devotees of Harvey Nichols in the late 1990s by temporarily decorating the Knightsbridge frontage of that illustrious emporium with a huge wooden pretzel that seemed to snake in and out of the store’s windows.

All very bizarre. But I was yet to encounter Master Heatherwick’s most startling work. “You’ve got to look at this . . . this thing,” a Man- cunian friend declared as I arrived in his city just before Christmas. He dragged me off to the City of Manchester Stadium. Of course I had seen the stadium before; it was where the 2002 Commonwealth Games were held. But not what was now in front of it. A gigantic new sculpture stretched into the sky like an exploding firework, or perhaps a flying metal porcupine. As high as Nelson’s Column and wide as the Bank of England, it comprised 180 tapering steel spikes, lurching outwards in all directions from a central trunk that leaned a dizzy 30 degrees away from the vertical with no visible means of support.

“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” my friend said. “Tallest sculpture in Britain. It’s called B of the Bang. And it’s been made by this young designer guy called . . .”

“Thomas Heatherwick,” I interrupted.

“Oh,” he said, looking disappointed. “You know all about it, then?” “No,” I said. “Just a wild guess.”

That did it. Who was this guy? A cross between Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Terence Conran and Steven Spielberg? I had to find out. So two days ago I made my way to an innocuous workshop on top of the Tube lines at King’s Cross. And there, amid exquisitely crafted models of caverns measureless to man and pleasure-domes as yet unbuilt, I found a charmingly dishevelled, softly-spoken 34-year-old with an unkempt mop of curls, three days’ stubble, deceptively sleepy eyes — and perhaps the most daring creative brain that Britain has nurtured for a generation. Thomas Heatherwick. In person.

I was lucky to catch him. Even by his standards, this is a big week. Today, B of the Bang is officially opened by Linford Christie. What other choice could there be? It was Christie’s famous (and indeed only) bon mot — that if you want to win Olympic gold you have to explode out of the starting-blocks “on the B of the bang” — which gave Heatherwick his inspiration in the first place.

“We were asked to design a monument to commemorate the 2002 Commonwealth Games,” Heatherwick says. “But we wanted to avoid the usual cliché — depicting peace and harmony between nations. Top-class sport isn’t peaceful at all. It’s incredibly aggressive. So the challenge we set ourselves was: what is the most unpassive, aggressive, dynamic object we could build?”