Costing £2m, Mark Wallinger’s giant white horse is approximately 164ft (50m) tall – twice as big as its counterpart, the Angel of the North, which was designed by Antony Gormley and completed in 1998. According to Sandra Soder, the secretary of the Gravesend Historical Society, Wallinger’s horse has aroused diverse local opinion, with the loudest voice coming from those most opposed, but the general feeling is that the promoters had deemed the people of north Kent “too culturally inept” to have a deciding view on the form Britain’s biggest work of art should take. In the words of one Northfleet man, nobody had asked whether or not “they wanted to wake up every morning looking into a giant horse’s arse”.