Mick Hartley

No surprise that Mark Wallingford’s white horse is the early favourite: the most significant point about the “Angel of the South” mega-sculpture competition is how poor all the other entries are. The Beeb have a brief film…

Five designs for a £2m hilltop landmark in Kent, which will be visible from road, rail and air, have been unveiled.

Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger is among internationally-acclaimed artists shortlisted for the Ebbsfleet Landmark.

He is proposing a white horse, 33 times life-size, which would look out over the Ebbsfleet Valley and mark the new Ebbsfleet International station.

The winning design will be announced this autumn and is expected to be completed in 2010.

Whiteread is proposing to create a craggy “recycled mountain” with a life-size cast interior of a house on the top.

Deacon’s sculpture would be a “nest” of steel latticework outlining 26 interconnecting polyhedrons.

French artist Daniel Buren has designed a “signal” tower of stacked cubes with a single laser beam of light passing through it.

Sculptor Christopher Le Brun has proposed a monumental wing and disc – a reference to the winged messenger of Mercury, the Roman god of travellers and commerce.

I wonder what the other artists think of Wallingford’s horse. After weeks, months, of imaginative struggle they come up with their various constructions, and then along comes Wallingford, with an idea that may have taken him all of five minutes to come up with – “I know. Let’s build a huge bloody great white horse”.

Though it pains me to say it, what with his execrable Turner Prize-winning display at Tate Britain, not to mention his efforts wandering around a gallery in Berlin in a bear suit, Wallingford’s horse is far and away the best here. The Angel of the North was something of a one-off, being a popular and artistic success, and the whole idea of creating a southern version smacks of PR desperation, but if we’re going to get one let’s have the horse. The others are just awful, from Rachel Whiteread’s concrete house (I liked her earlier inside-out house in Bow, but can’t she do anything else?) to Richard Deacon’s silly lattice structure, to Christopher Le Brun’s pompous disc and wing – “a reference to the winged messenger of Mercury, the Roman god of travellers and commerce”. Please not that one. A modern white horse to echo all those bronze-age white horses that litter the southern English countryside: it’s a neat idea – plus the sheer visceral impact of seeing that massive beast from miles away.

If they decide to go for it, that’s when the real work will begin, of course. They’ll have to lower this huge block of white marble – probably the biggest the world’s ever seen – on to the field near Ebbsfleet, and let Mark Wallingford get to work with his hammer and chisel, releasing the inner horse just as Michelangelo released the inner David from his marble prison those centuries ago. Perhaps he could do it while wearing his bear suit…