In 674 a Northumbrian noble named Benedict Biscop founded St Peter's Church on this north bank of the Wear. Biscop had travelled to Rome and brought back what England did not yet have: books, relics, and the idea that walls could glow. To glaze his windows he imported French craftsmen, the first glassmakers Britain had seen since the Romans left. The monastery he established would become half of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey, the twin-house that produced the Venerable Bede and the Codex Amiatinus - the oldest complete Latin Bible in the world. The original church still stands, in fragments, at the heart of the modern district. Light still falls through coloured glass in this place. It has been doing so for thirteen hundred and fifty years.

Long before Sunderland became a single city, the south bank held two villages - Bishopwearmouth and Sunderland proper - while Monkwearmouth held the north. The river divided them more thoroughly than any modern road does. Each had its own parish, its own dialect inflection, its own opinion of the others. The 1796 Wearmouth Bridge stitched the banks together physically; the 1897 abolition of Monkwearmouth's parish, when it was absorbed into Sunderland, made the union official on paper. The Barbary Coaster identity persisted longer than the boundary did. Even now, people from the north bank will tell you they are not from Sunderland exactly. They are from Monkwearmouth.

Wearmouth Colliery sank its first shaft in 1826 and kept hauling coal for nearly 170 years - through two world wars, the General Strike, nationalization, and decline - until it closed in December 1993. The closure came in the same decade that the last great Wearside shipyards fell silent. For more than a century, Monkwearmouth had been a place where men walked to work past the smell of coal smoke and the ringing of riveters' hammers. When the noise stopped, something had to come next. The site of the colliery became, improbably, the foundation of the Stadium of Light - Sunderland AFC's new ground, which opened in 1997 on the very pit where coal had been hauled to the surface.

Today the river bank holds a different kind of industry. The University of Sunderland's St Peter's campus rises near Bede's old church, and the National Glass Centre - opened in 1998 on the former J.L. Thompson shipyard - lets visitors walk across a roof made of 3,250 square metres of glass panels six centimetres thick. The choice of glass was not accidental. Biscop's French glaziers worked these banks in the seventh century. Sunderland glassware was exported across Britain in the eighteenth. Pyrex was manufactured here within living memory. The Glass Centre faces an uncertain future - closure was proposed for 2026 - but the longer arc holds. Light keeps finding new ways to enter this place.