Sunderland is the second largest city in North East England, just behind Newcastle (which is a tad to the north). It's on the North Sea coast 240 miles from London, pretty much due east of Carlisle. It sits at the mouth of the river Wear and was once globally renowned for its shipbuilding. It was made a city in 1992 as part of celebrations for the Queen's Ruby Jubilee and in 2016 was the first place to declare for Brexit. It gets six direct trains a day from London but they all arrive after noon, except on Saturdays so that's when I went. It's also the most populous English settlement I'd never been to, or was until the weekend, and I'm very pleased to have put that right.[Visit Sunderland][26 photos]
The best place to start a day out in Sunderland, unless you're off to the football, is the Museum and Winter Gardens on the edge of Mowbray Park. It's England's oldest municipally-funded museum and also one of the busiest, being centrally placed and cohabiting with the main library. The most striking feature is the glass drum of the Winter Gardens, added via a lottery grant in 2001 and duly opened by the Queen the following year. It's filled with tropical plants and towering trees, plus a fishpond and the occasional cracked dinosaur egg to give visiting children a thrill. Best of all a curving staircase allows you to climb up through the midst of the canopy, past a thrusting silver column whose surface flows with running water, to a looping treetop balcony allowing panoramic views and the odd vertiginous twinge. It's a fabulous space of the kind we hardly build any more, indeed just 15 minutes into my trip to Sunderland I was already thinking 'hell yes'.
The museum has several galleries arranged irregularly over three floors including one for shipbuilding, one for coal, one for pottery and one for motley objects. The natural history gallery includes Britain's only fossil of a gliding reptile, the earliest vertebrate known to be capable of flight, and also the stuffed walrus thought to have inspired Lewis Carroll's famous poem. The display of Pyrex glassware in the 20th century gallery includes several classic designs that made me properly nostalgic, plus an ordinary-looking fluted glass bowl labelled 'Last piece of Pyrex made in Sunderland 2007' (which was when production finally relocated to France). Upstairs I particularly enjoyed the temporary exhibition 'Coal Face' which couples Andy Martin's black and white portraits of former miners with Louise Powell's verbatim poetry to very striking effect, pondering the human impact of the Durham coalfield. Note to self: the associated series of podcasts is here.
The building also contains an art gallery displaying the some of the city's collection, most notably a wall of Lowrys to celebrate the artist's late-developing love for Sunderland which kickstarted at the age of 82 when he stopped off at a seaside hotel for lunch. By contrast the modern works on display are currently all glass-based, including a deadly but beautiful triptych of knobbly viruses by Luke Jerram. And OK the pottery gallery was closed to accommodate half term workshops, and the cafe operator's recently threw in the towel, and nobody's yet managed to raise the money to add a bronze carpenter beside the bronze walrus outside by the lake, but as municipal buildings go that's a strong start for Sunderland.
The city centre is the usualmix of 'grid of Victorian streets' and 'massive mall opened by minor royal in the 1980s', these located either side of the central station. It's by no means as rundown as some northern towns, indeed several shops sell designer labels and one offers an in-store trainer-cleaning service. But the splendid classical-fronted Marks & Spencer now lies empty, nobody's yet expressed an interest in the anchor Debenhams and a lot of the retail focus is now bargain-based and refreshment-focused. Beyond the shops lies Sunderland Minster, formerly the parish church, which sits on an ancient site but is a 19th century reconstruction. And close by is the city's great future hope, the redeveloped Riverside quarter, a massive site spearheaded by the new (and architecturally undemanding) City Hall. It's pencilled in for modern office space, 1000 homes and various cultural touchpoints including the National Esports Performance Campus, but I think I arrived a few years too early.
The lowest crossing point on the river is the century-old Wearmouth Bridge, a green-painted through-arch design with a broad steel span. The original at this location was the second major bridge to be built from cast iron - twice as long as the Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale - but was mostly dismantled by Robert Stephenson in 1859. The railway bridgealongside is late Victorian and today provides a brief scenic interlude for Metro and Northern services. I accidentally timed my crossing for "15 minutes before a Sunderland match" so joined the red and white striped throng heading for The Stadium of Light, or at least the stragglers who were probably wishing they'd left the pub a bit earlier. And then I left them behind by following a precipitous stone staircase to the bottom of the gorge, following in the footsteps of generations of foundrymen and shipbuilders who'd have swarmed this way daily to the dockside.
Sunderland's last shipyard closed in 1988 and the lower banks are now occupied by a stripe of parkland, flats and public buildings. I imagine it's busier when the campus of the University of Sunderland is in full swing, but the disconnect in height gave the promenade a remote and eerie vibe. A sculpture trail has been added in an attempt to enliven the path and bring local history to light, which I was delighted to see had been curated by Chaz Brenchley, an author whose books I avidly stockpiled in the 80s and 90s. The first sculpture is called Shadows In Another Light and features a tree made of girders bursting forth from a plinth encircled by plaster panels. As a further nod to the city's ship-building past the two-tone paving alongside resembles the shadow of a lofty crane, and scattered all around are giant concrete nuts and bolts... riveting.
The site of the North Sands Shipyard is now home to the National Glass Centre, because Sunderland's glass-making heritage goes much further back than just Pyrex. This wedge-shaped building was opened in 1998, obviously glass-fronted but also partly glass-roofed, the idea being that visitors could walk up onto the sloping roof and peer down at some of the exhibits inside. I was expecting great things of the interior, particularly when I saw the size of the cafe, but the historical display was mediocre, the single exhibition gallery is currently devoted to ceramics rather than glass, the art gallery was a 2-minuter and I'd unfortunately missed one of the daily 30-minute glassmaking demos. Even the roof has long been barriered off for safety reasons. Alas the mounting cost of building repairs and the low number of visitors mean the National Glass Centre is now scheduled for closure nextyear, so if you want to see the site of Boris's celebratory Brexit Day cabinet meeting come soon.
Behind the NGC car park on Lookout Hill is a parish church surrounded by crocuses with a cafe bolted onto the back. But St Peter's is also one of the oldest churches in the country having been built as part of a monastery in 674AD, the outline of part of which has been marked out as a series of paved rectangles alongside. Its most famous monk was the Venerable Bede who was sent here at the age of seven to train for holy orders, but only for a few years before transferring to an even newer monastery in Jarrow where he spent the rest of his days. Only the west wall and porch remain from Bede's day, the tower being 10th century and the north aisle more like 13th, although that's still an amazing long-term survival. Saturday alas is not the day to see the interior, what with tours and the cafe being weekdays only, so I strode on to the seaside.
That'd be Roker, a North-Sea-facing suburb whose finest houses line the rim of a low clifftop. Up top is Roker Park which gave its name to Sunderland FC's former homeground, and which is now a bland set of millennial cul de sacs with names like Promotion Close, Turnstile Mews and Midfield Drive. Down below is a brief promenade of refreshment boltholes including a part-time chippy and the more dubious Grandpa Dickie's Shed, whose sun trap beer garden is not a draw in February. A sandy beach stretches north as far as Seaburn, Sunderland's most prestigious quarter, but I didn't get that far. I had hoped to walk out along the parabolic breakwater to Roker's iconic lighthouse but that's been closed since suffering storm damage in 2023 so I had to make do with admiring it from the upper foreshore and trying to line up the perfect photo.
Maybe it was the unseasonable fine weather or maybe I missed the insalubrious parts but I rather liked Sunderland, which just goes to show that actually visiting somewhere can sometimes undo all the bad press you've heard about it over many years.
