Sunderland
What to see
You’ll find accounts of Sunderland’s tourist attractions, shopping, eating out etc at See it, Do it, Sunderland.
Links to Sunderland attractions include:
● Donnison Heritage, Education & Media Centre
● Keel Square
● National Glass Centre
● North East Land, Sea & Air Museum
● Roker Park Conservation Area
● St Peter’s Church
● Sculpture Trail
● Sunderland Maritime Heritage Centre
● Sunderland Minster
● Sunderland Museum, Art Gallery & Winter Gardens
Towns of Two Halves extracts:
● “It’s a slightly disorientating city. Arriving on the Metro from Newcastle, you pass through the air over the majestic Wearmouth railway bridge and are immediately ushered underground for Sunderland’s central station. Accustomed perhaps to the north of England’s magnificent Victorian railway buildings, you may feel slightly lost – it feels more like a stop on the Northern Line.”
● “The Museum, Art Gallery & Winter Gardens… as the name suggests, has a lot to offer. The main attraction for children, by the way, is said to be a stuffed lion called Wallace, but for me the axolotl beats Wallace into a cocked hat. Wallace would probably yield several cocked hats.”
● “St Peter’s is a church sufficiently important to have been a candidate for World Heritage Site status. It is one of the oldest stone churches in Britain, dating from 674AD. The first coloured-glass window in the UK was produced to decorate the church, and the famously venerable Bede lived and worked here.”
● “The National Glass Centre is in equal parts an educational resource, a viewing platform, museum, exhibition space, restaurant, shop and events venue. The exhibition was Wearable Glass on my visit; some of the items were wearable only if you employed bearers.”
These are taken from the Sunderland chapter of Towns of Two Halves, published in 2018. To buy a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.