CELEBRATIONS began yesterday to mark the Year Of The Artist, which saw £1m spent in the North-East on breaking down barriers between art and everyday life.

Throughout Britain, £4m was spent on 1,700 artists taking their work into the workplace and on to the streets. More than 100 artists took part in the North-East experiment.

Northern Arts, in Newcastle, has decided to spend £300,000 on an Encore project, to fund further artists' residencies.

On Sunday, a high-profile event ended when Tyneside's Metro hosted an artistic train ride. More than 80 Cub Scouts and Brownies wore costumes for an hour-long ride, which featured sights, sounds and words to entertain the public.

Nexus, which operates the Metro, agreed to artist Topsy Qu'ret, sound artist Carol McGuigan and poet Subhadassi staging events through the year.

This ranged from Qu'ret and McGuigan putting together a video about people on the platform, displayed on the Metro's viewscreen ticket machines, to Subhadassi's poems running on posters and tickets.

McGuigan said: "This was all about bringing artists out of the safety of the gallery and testing the reaction of Metro passengers. We discovered we couldn't be too subtle, put on anything that wasn't intelligible . . . and not get on people's nerves."

Qu'ret, who had fun with the stories of how Gateshead's name derived from Goat's Head, said: "There were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people watching what we were doing. I've really enjoyed the fact that Tyneside is redeveloping with art and culture at its centre."