The Angel of the North is to be followed by a monumental sculpted wormhole.

The Turner prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor is to create one of the world’s biggest sculptures by straddling a run-down harbour in Hartlepool with a space-age pedestrian bridge.

The tubular steel structure, resembling an outer-space wormhole, will span 520ft and is expected to have a polished surface that reflects its bleak surroundings.

Partly inspired by Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago, the bridge will be retractable to allow ships into port.

Local officials are hoping the structure will place Hartlepool on the tourist map, in the same way that Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North – at 65ft in height, a comparative minnow of a sculpture – has attracted visitors to Gateshead.

In recent years Hartlepool has been best-known for electing a mayor who campaigned in a monkey costume and pledged free bananas to school-children, and for being the former parliamentary constituency of Peter Mandelson.

The wormhole bridge is one of five public sculptures due to be built in the next 10 years on Teesside and along the Tees valley by Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, a structural engineer.

Designs for the first of these so-called Tees Valley Giants was unveiled last week. Temenos (Greek for sanctuary) will be suspended between Middlesbrough’s transporter bridge and the Riverside football stadium.

Although it will be 360ft long and 165ft tall, Kapoor’s Hartlepool bridge will dwarf it. The three other sculptures will be built in Stockton, Redcar and Darlington.

“The form for the [Hartlepool] bridge comes from an ellipsoid, which is the generic shape we are using as inspiration for all the [Tees Valley] Giants,” said Balmond.

“It will be a partly open tube shape, stretched across the dock, which people will be able to walk through. The experience of moving through it and out the other side will be amazing.”

Indian-born Kapoor won the Turner prize in 1991 and is famous for his simple but imposing geometric forms.

In 2002 he produced a vast PVC and steel sculpture called Marsyas, which filled the vast Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern gallery. “After Marsyas, we had a conviction that we should think big and monumental on form,” said Balmond.

Joe Docherty, the chief executive of Tees Valley Regeneration, who believes the new sculptures will require a combination of public and private funding, said: “The brief was to make five things; it was Anish who asked me ‘Do you mind if they’re big?’

“In terms of whether this is good art, I don’t think anybody would have a definitive statement on that, but we certainly wouldn’t have done it if we thought it was awful.”

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