I’m standing in a litter-strewn alley a few blocks north of King’s Cross station in London wondering where the hell Antony Gormley’s studio is. There is no friendly Angel of the North to guide the way and it is raining hard, so in frustration I push an unmarked buzzer next to a 12ft-high tin wall. As the entire thing glides open, I emit a girlish scream in shock and a cabbie across the road laughs at me. The magic hydraulics slide back to reveal an LA-style compound of perfect white buildings and poured concrete. Bingo.

Nice pad, if a little chichi for a former Buddhist. Gormley’s rather socialist mission is to get art out of recherché studios (like this) and museums and into the real world. And yet — like Willy Wonka — Britain’s greatest living sculptor is working in a temple to his own ego.

Personal effigies (most of the 56-year-old’s work involves casting his naked body in metal) are dotted across the courtyard and even more are under construction in a large studio opposite, immaculate as an operating theatre and full of bearded young men with blowtorches melting metal into blobs.

These blobs will some day fetch millions. Meanwhile their creator, who is both a Turner prize winner and an OBE, will continue to tour the world giving frenzied speeches on art’s role in society (“It is the crucial element in ensuring human survival”) and blessing cities with his statues.

Strangely — given how bleak his work can be and how detached he is in person — people love Gormley more than almost any other public artist working today, not least for his 66ft-high Angel of the North at Gateshead. Then there’s the astonishing 600,000 people who have travelled to Crosby over the past 15 months to see his latest masterpiece, Another Place. It comprises 100 naked male statues spread over a two-mile stretch of beach near Liverpool. When the tide is high many of them are submerged while the wind and rain erode the rest.

One imagines people come to contemplate man’s eternal struggle with the elements and ask probing questions about the horizon that all the statues are staring at. Plenty of others just enjoy dressing the men up in silly outfits and painting their rude bits bright yellow. And people say the northwest is a cultural desert?

Yet earlier this month, when an application was made to extend Another Place’s stay on Merseyside, Sefton council said no. Despite thousands of visitors every week and a plan to drum up the £2.2m needed to buy Gormley’s figures and stop them emigrating to America, councillors sided with a tiny handful of dour birdwatchers and windsurfers who objected to the statues remaining on health, safety and environmental grounds. Given that Liverpool is supposed to be the European Capital of Culture in 2008, the rebuff was extra embarrassing.

“It would make you weep if it didn’t make you cry,” says Gormley who, like his statues, measures 6ft 4in but turns out to be more down to earth than his fancy digs suggest. Sitting in his cavernous drawing studio he reminds me of an overgrown student circa 1970 which, it turns out, he was.

“I’m always mindful of health and safety and I’m very careful about installing the work correctly,” he says. “But that isn’t enough any more, not since we went litigation mad. This new American-style attitude means people are betraying their own ability to decide what is safe and, worse than that, they are cashing in on it.”

Obviously he is not best keen on Britain’s elf’n’safety culture, but he saves his real ire for the town hall bureaucrats. “It has often been this way in the UK. A few years ago Leeds council ran an international competition, gave me a commission, fought for and won the money to build it, secured a site for 300 years, then denied it planning permission.” He whistles at the stupidity. “There is no logic other than small minds in some grey zone of human experience wanting to deny the unusual.”

He will concede that “some of the statues (in Another Place) sit quite deep. When the tide is high many lurk anything from a foot to 24ft beneath the waves, so I appreciate that it is not ideal for swimmers. But since they don’t allow swimming on the beach anyway, what difference does that make? “Neither are we talking about the seafront at Brighton here. It isn’t a holiday destination. Yes, there are some jet skiers and windsurfers, but they are not a huge number.” And the locals? “Some of them, a minority I believe, are complaining that there are not enough toilet facilities for visitors and that people leave litter behind, but it’s a shame to blame human curiosity and art for whatever tracks are left. There is, after all, a bigger picture.”

He clears his throat for the sermon: “There has been a sense in the northwest of inevitable decline, and while I would never use the regeneration card as an argument for the making of art, I think the fact that all these people came to Crosby indicates a shift in appetite. They want physical signs in their environment that they are no longer victims of their past. Art mustn’t be stopped.”

This kind of agitprop is why so many people love Gormley. His work may be figurate and digestible, but it is his soundbites that really sell it to the masses, and when he stops spouting his more impenetrable art-speak he can produce real gems.