Exhibits are spread over three floors, the lowest one branching off a museum street housing a display on local heroes - campaign medals and a small memorial to the 197 men of the 125th Anti - Tank Regiment who were killed or imprisoned at the fall of Singapore, England caps and club medals belonging to Raich Carter, and photos of the local diver Harry Watts, described by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie as "the bravest man I ever met". The Textile Traditions, Secrets of the Past and Sunderland Pottery sections are also interesting, though the most popular room is undoubtedly the Time Machine, which showcases some of the oldest and strangest exhibits in the museum’s collection, including the first car off the Nissan production line in 1986, a Siberian walrus head, and Wallace the Lion, the stuffed remains of a circus animal that died in 1865.

Next door in Life & Work in the Coal Mining Communities of East Durham, original banners from Murton, Seaham, Dawdon, Ryhope and Monkwearmouth collieries hang over the dark, selectively illuminated entrance. A solid, half ton piece of coal mined for the 1929 North East Coast Exhibition towers above a scale model of a pit head; rooms from a Methodist chapel and a Rheumatic clinic lead to a colliery house with a kitchen range and décor straight out of Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier.

Sunderland’s Glorious Glass is located upstairs, situated on a landing between a display on 20th-century Sunderland and the Art Gallery and Special Exhibitions rooms. There are twenty works by L.S. Lowry, who spent much of his later life at Seaburn, in the Art Gallery, among them several industrial scenes from the river and a self-portrait showing a phallic column rising from a bleak, featureless sea. There’s also a large collection of Burmese artifacts collected during the days of Empire such as marble Buddhas, teak chairs, ivory hilted silver swords and boat shaped boxes.

A final staircase leads to Launched on Wearside, dedicated to the town’s 600-year-old shipbuilding industry. A full - size reconstruction of a ship’s bow occupies the center of the floor, its interior housing a small cinema showing footage from yards that employed a third of the town’s adult workforce between 1880 and 1950. Poignant displays of famous ships and defunct occupations line the walls amid a soundtrack of riveters' hammers and the constant ring of metal on metal.

Mowbray Park lies at the heart of the city, a green space of fountains, flowers and monuments such as the Victorian bandstand, the towering War Memorial, a bronze walrus sculpture commemorating Lewis Carroll’s frequent visits to the town, and an iron bridge over an old mineral railway line. The ornamental lake has been particularly well restored, forming a semi-circle of water lilies, wooden bridges and painted benches thronged with people and pigeons.

You can get a view of the new Winter Gardens through the glass sides, which face out over the terraces, reflecting the plants on the placid water outside. However, you can only enter the modernistic glass and steel rotunda through the main museum.

Take the winding steel staircase or glass lift up to the tree top walkway, where you can look back down on a canopy of over 1,500 exotic flowers and trees including spiky cactus plants, palm and bamboo, Chinese yam, Australian eucalyptus, Arabian coffee plants, tiny plantations of tea, sugar, date palms, mangoes, vanilla and olives, and fragrant lemon and orange trees. At ground level, a concrete path decorated with footprints and foliage patterns winds through a fern gully to a pool stocked with Koi carp, and the rush of water down the vertical steel water sculpture mixes with the rain forest soundtrack piped out by loudspeakers disguised as rocks.