Northumberlandia: The Lady of the North East England

Meet the supine, the Lady of the North the former coal mining town of “Cramlington, Northumberland”, North East England, is a massive piece of land art in the shape of reclining lady named “Northumberlandia”. The lady is more than a hundred feet tall at her tallest point, her forehead, and a quarter of a mile long. The Woman lies on her back, with her long hairs spread out, upper body in supine position and her lower torso twisted towards her left, as it looks like that she is dancing. It is created by American landscape architect and designer Charles Jencks, “Northumberlandia” is said to be largest human landform sculpture in the world. It is officially opened by a woman “Princess Anne” in September 2015, it has become an apparent hit, with 25,000 visitors in its first few weeks.

Hence, “Northumberlandia” was shaped from the by-products of an opencast mine in “Shotton” well owned by Banks Group and Blagdon Estates. Whereas digging for coal the employers feels that there was a fabulous opportunity to imaginatively reuse all the rocks and dirt dug out of the ground in its place of dumping them into bland hills. Therefore, they contacted famous artist “Charles Jencks” to see what could be done and Northumberlandia was born.

However, it took Charles Jencks 2 years to build and shape her shapely figure and bodily limbs out of 1.5m tonnes of rock, clay and soil redundant from the mine. Therefore, her core is made of rocks, layered over with clay and topped with soil over which an excellent grass grows now. Moreover, some of her features are beautifully artistically highlighted with stone from the mine that is frequently used for the restoration of old buildings. Thus, the figure provides a series of resting and viewing platforms, the uppermost on the forehead, from which you can get a view of the open cast mine from where she came.