WHAT is set to become Britain’s tallest steel sculpture is being prepared for transportation over the Pennines to Manchester, where it will be assembled by engineers.

Altogether, 180 tapering spikes of varying width and length will be fitted together in a complex starburst pattern on top of a giant matrix of five legs before being raised 184ft (56m) above the ground.

The artwork, which is three times higher than the Angel of the North, will stand beside the City of Manchester Stadium, in East Manchester, to commemorate the success of the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

The B of the Bang looks like an exploding firework on stilts. It is designed to symbolise the burst of energy as athletes respond to the starter’s pistol.

The title comes from a comment by Linford Christie, the former Olympic champion sprinter, who said he aimed to break from the blocks “on the B of the bang”.

The £1.4 million sculpture, which will lean at an alarming 30-degree angle, represents an extraordinary engineering challenge. The spikes are under construction at the AK Heavy Engineering foundry in Sheffield, Yorkshire. They are due to be loaded on the largest lorries permitted on British roads next month and transported to Manchester in a journey expected to take three days.

Preparatory work has already been carried out at the site to make way for 750 tonnes of foundations which are made up of 400sq m reinforced concrete slabs.

The sculpture, commissioned by the regeneration company New East Manchester, was chosen by a panel of local residents and art experts from a competition shortlist two years ago. It is funded jointly by the European Union and Manchester City Council.

It has already led to a fierce debate about whether it represents architecture or sculpture. One critic has described it as a “potentially dangerous Christmas tree bauble”. Others balked at the engineering problems it presented.

It will be 3ft shorter than Nelson’s Column and about the same height as the leaning Tower of Pisa. It will weigh 150 tonnes.

The starburst is the creation of Thomas Heatherwick, 33, a former Manchester Polytechnic student, now based in London, who was “spotted” and brought on by the designer Sir Terence Conran.

His early works include turning a roundabout in Newcastle-upon-Tyne into a blue glass carpet. He was also responsible for the iconic “pretzel” artwork which once decorated Harvey Nichols’s façade in Knightsbridge, London.

He said recently: “I wish I could say I got the idea because something spiky blew across my path, tumbleweed or something like that, but it was nothing like that at all.

“It just came to me that in a flat landscape, we could do something special and the land around the stadium is flat. So a big statement could be made.”

Assembly of the sculpture is likely to take the remainder of the summer and become an impromptu tourist attraction.

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