At The End Of The Line.

The Mowbray Park development is the highlight of a visit to the city. Set aside an afternoon to take in the Museum, Winter Gardens and the renovated Victorian park, all of which are absolutely free.

The most high profile of the city’s other attractions is the National Glass Center, which documents Sunderland’s glass making industry. The museum’s restaurant, Thowingstones, has just been named as one of the top 200 restaurants in Britain.

Sunderland Marina is nearby, as are the bridges over the River Wear, Monkwearmouth Station Museum and St Peter’s, built by Benedict Biscop in 674AD.

While the twin seaside resorts of Roker and Seaburn lack the scenery and facilities of the beaches further north at the mouth of the Tyne, they’re both close enough to the city center to be worth a short visit. There’s a well-preserved 19th-century windmill at Seaburn, whose seafront hosts Europe’s biggest International Air show at the end of every July and is illuminated annually in November.

As with the beaches, the shopping and leisure amenities in Sunderland suffer by comparison to those found a few miles further north in Newcastle. However, The Bridges Shopping Center, just a short walk from Central Station, is home to a number of major retailers, and the Sunderland Empire Theatre has recently hosted touring productions of Starlight Express, La Traviata and Swan Lake.

Quick Tips:

Sunderland can easily be seen in a day trip. Stay in Newcastle and take the Metro into the city. Cheap all-day tickets are available on Wednesdays (after 9am) and Sundays. If you’re taking the Metro from Newcastle, make sure you board trains going to South Hylton, not South Shields.

The Tourist Information Center is located a short walk from Central Station. Use the side exit from the station, turn left, and it's sign-posted along with the Museum and Mowbray Park at the end of the street.

Pick up a copy of the Metro produced Great Days Out booklet at any tourist information center or Metro ticket office. The booklet lists 100 attractions located close to Metro stations and often has special offers.

Best Way To Get Around:

There are nine Metro stations in Sunderland, though only four of them are really of use to most visitors. The main city center sights – the Museum, Mowbray Park, Monkwearmouth and the National Glass Center – can be visited on foot using St Peter’s or Central Station as a starting point. Park Lane Station is closest to Sunderland Empire and the main bus and coach station; get off at Seaburn for the beaches and Fulwell Windmill.

The main bus operators in the city are Stagecoach and Go North East. There are a number of services running to Penshaw Monument, including the X6, X8, 638, 775, 777 and 778. All bar the 777, which departs from Newgate Street in Newcastle and calls at Gateshead Metro Station, leave from either Washington or Sunderland city center.

For pubs and restaurants, check out the University or the streets around Central Station. There are listings and reviews on Sunderland-at-night.

Monkwearmouth Station opened in 1848 as the terminus station for Sunderland. Eventually reduced in stature when the branch line was extended over the nearby river to the new Central Station, Monkwearmouth closed to passengers in 1967 and was turned into a museum six years later.

The initial stature of the station is evident from the monumental Ionic portico in the center of its sandstone façade, designed by the local architect Thomas Moore at the instigation of the town’s MP, George Hudson. A portrait of the politician painted by Sir Francis Grant, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, hangs in the central waiting room by the entrance to the museum, next to an original driver’s cab from a 1960 Leyland Atlantean bus, a small gift shop, and a scale model of the station before its iron and glass roof was removed.

The Booking Office next door was added in 1866, although the reconstruction dates from the 1900s. Among the exhibits is an original coin tester – forged coins were broken between its teeth – and an unwieldy looking ticket dating press. The period furnishing includes posters for day-trips to seaside resorts, a fireplace and coal bucket and telegraph equipment.

You can also visit a small section of the original sidings, now overlooked by a Total petrol station and heaps of scrap yard metal, where a 1915 brake van once used on colliery trains, a wooden carriage truck and some original signals are on display. Unfortunately the restored footbridge, which arches over the tracks to the passenger shelters on the other side, is off limits due to its proximity to the modern day Metro lines.

The third room in the museum is used for temporary exhibitions, which in recent years have included the emergency services, displays on Sunderland during the reign of Elizabeth II and, currently, a number of original railway posters dating back to the 1920s.

The museum is located a hundred meters away from St Peter’s Metro Station. Opening hours are 10am – 5pm Monday to Saturday and 2-5pm Sunday. Admission is free.

Mowbray Park is another fine example of Sunderland’s Victorian heritage. It was first laid out in 1857 and extended nine years later to include planted gardens, a terrace and an ornamental lake. The Museum and Winter Gardens, built in French Chateau style and modeled on the famed Crystal Palace, opened almost two decades later and proved immensely popular until they were destroyed beyond repair by a German bomb in 1941. Now, following £13 million of funding from the National Lottery, Mowbray Park, the Museum and the Winter Gardens have been restored and reopened to the public.

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.

Penshaw Monument was built in 1844 as a half-sized pastiche of the Theseum in Athens. Dating from an age when landmarks were built to the vanity of landowners and glory of patriotic heroes rather than at the behest of council bosses and government quangoes, the monument was paid for by public subscription and designed by the local architects John and Benjamin Green - who were also jointly responsible for Grey's Monuments and the Theatre Royal in Newcastle -in honour of John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, former ambassador to Russia and the first Governor General of Canada. The sandstone edifice stands 100 feet long, 53 feet wide and 70 feet high, a grand folly of 18 Greek Doric columns, each almost 7 feet thick, raised on a stone platform, and entirely open to the elements between its imposing end pediments.

It's a steep 100-step dirt and wooden riser climb to the top of the hill. Clambering up the base, just over a metre above ground level, you stand between columns blackened by industrial dirt, their bases spattered with graffiti that grows less imaginative with each passing decade. Down below, on either side of the steps up the hill, the remains of the ramparts from an Iron Age fort ring the grass, though some still say the marks were caused by the legendary Lambton Worm as it slept coiled round the hill.

The view from the hollow column in the south east corner of the monument looks out over a flat landscape stretching 450 metres down and several miles across to the North Sea, a white ferry reflecting the early evening summer sunlight as it moves silently past Seaburn, clumps of high rise buildings to the south encircling Sunderland city centre, and the browns and yellows of newly cultivated land stretching beyond the waste high scrub land up on the hill.

Further to the north, tracing the coastline up towards the Tyne, the matchstick like Cleadon Water Tower tops a hill over to the east, marking the border of a panorama along the banks of the river, the distant shipyard cranes overlooking half-hidden suburbs, all fronted by the light-grey corrugated factory units of Washington, Nissan's huge pre-fabricated buildings and the sprawling green landscape of Washington Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust.

West are the rounded hills of Durham, misted by the slowly setting sun, stringing themselves out towards Lambton Castle and Chester-le-Street. The flat land in the foreground is covered with dark green tree cover faced by steadily encroaching rows of semi-detached homes, still and orderly except for the occasional car and the repetitive melody of a lone ice cream van.

Sunderland was the first town outside of London to have a publicly funded museum as far back as 1846. The current museum, rebuilt on a site dating to 1870 and destroyed in 1941, covers the history of the city and environs, with a special emphasis on the area’s industrial heritage.

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.

This route runs along the north bank of the Wear, past modern and historic attractions to the twin seaside resorts of Roker and Seaburn.

Start at St Peter’s Metro Station, crossing North Bridge Street and continuing along Dame Dorothy Street. After five minutes you’ll see St Peter’s Church on your right. The history of the church dates back to 674AD when Benedict Biscop built a monastery on the site, importing craftsmen from France and Rome. The Venerable Bede, England’s first historian, started his monastic life here before moving to Jarrow; during the Dark Ages the twin monasteries were two of the last communities of religious learning in the whole of Europe. Although nothing remains of the original monastery above ground today, the church retains an original Saxon tower and there is a small exhibition inside.

Walk on until you reach a roundabout, where a right turn will bring you to riverside and the new National Glass Centre, whose grim looking steel and glass exterior belies the interesting, though slightly overpriced, exhibition space inside. There are permanent displays on the history of glassmaking in the city as well as temporary exhibitions by living artists which change every few months.

Head back up to Dame Dorothy Street, turning right in the direction of the seafront. The revamped Sunderland Marina is visible back on the riverfront, crammed with small boats it forms a stark contrast to the few fishing boats bobbing up and down on the river in front of the remaining shipyard cranes. Roker Beach starts at the end of the street, a wide stretch of sand running away from the long pier, limestone cliffs and concrete paths linking ice cream huts and amusement arcades. Walk north along the beach until you reach the more developed resort at Seaburn, starting on the other side of a whitewashed lighthouse. All the quintessential components of a British seaside holiday are present: a slate grey sea; kids racing along the sand, swerving to avoid the sharp pebbles; adults hunched inside windbreakers; rock pools; a blustery pier; an old train carriage converted into a restaurant; shacks selling ice cream and fish and chips; the smell of salt & vinegar; lager as warm as the air temperature; the dismal string of lights on the front of noisy amusement arcades; local radio piped over a cheap tannoy system; abandoned sandcastles and a half empty fairground.

Chichester Road runs inland opposite the lighthouse, merging into Sea Road and continuing up to Seaburn Metro Station and the nearby Fullwell Windmill. Built in the early 19th century, the structure has been restored in recent years and is now the only working windmill in the region. Guided tours go up to the top floor, where you can see the machinery working and look out across the city. Opening times vary, but the windmill is generally open only at weekends and during school holidays.