Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Space Invaders in Gateshead

A look at the seven Gateshead Invaders.


The French street artist known as Invader has invaded London, Manchester and Newcastle. On our trip to the World Transplant Games in Newcastle last weekend we were able to add to our tally of Invaders spotted.


Space Invader street art in Gateshead
Clockwise from top left - NCL_21, NCL_19, NCL_20, NCL_14, NCL_25, NCL_05 and NCL_06

There were originally 25 Space Invaders in Newcastle and Gateshead. Made during the INVASION of Newcastle in 2006. One has since been destroyed. We've found the remaining 24, with seven of these 'Newcastle Invaders' over the border in Gateshead.


  • NCL_05
  • NCL_06
  • NCL_14
  • NCL_19
  • NCL_20
  • NCL_21
  • NCL_25


You can find them at Gateshead Interchange, on the approach to the Sage Gateshead and at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.

Invader has so far invaded 78 cities around the world, putting up 3785 pieces.

To date I've managed to find 120 Invaders, worth 3040 points on the Flash Invaders app. At the time of writing I'm ranked 13640 in the ever-changing world rankings. Emily is 34485. The person at the top of the leader-board has found 2544 of them!

Looking for the Space Invaders has been great fun and we've seen lots of the parts of cities we wouldn't necessarily have explored if we weren't Invader hunting.

3 comments:

Jonathan Harley said...

Hi, I'm interested to see that you've found 24 of the Tyneside invaders, as of last week. I've been looking for them too but I've found at least two sites that no longer have an invader: on the Bank of England building on Pilgrim St (now demolished); and at Low Bridge. If you have one of these, I'd be interested to know which one and what its number/code was.
Happy hunting!

Richard Gottfried said...

Hi Jonathan.

The only Invader I haven't managed to get is NCL_02. I believe that was the one that was on the demolished building.

We've done the hunting on two trips, one last September and one this month.

We saw a few from last year this time, but didn't revisit them all.

Cheers.

Richard

Richard Gottfried said...

I've just looked.

The one on Low Bridge is NCL_22.

It was still there the last time we looked. It's part way up the stairs that link from the street down to Side.