Seaburn lies on the North Sea coast at the northern edge of Sunderland, bordered by Whitburn to the north, Fulwell to the west, and Roker to the south. The seafront has a sandy Blue Flag beach, a promenade, two amusement arcades, children's playgrounds, fish and chip shops, small guest houses, and two four-star hotels: The Grand Hotel and the Seaburn Inn. The main shopping street is Sea Road, which climbs from the seafront up through Fulwell to Seaburn Metro station. Around Queens Parade a small restaurant strip developed over the years: as of 2009 it counted three Italian, two Indian, and two Chinese restaurants, along with several pubs and coffee shops. The mix is unpretentious and reliable, the food of a town that knows what it likes.

Look behind the seafront and the housing tells a different story. Much of Seaburn consists of low-density private homes set among open parkland, with large mansion houses lining the coast and the adjoining streets. This is among the most expensive housing stock in Sunderland, and has been for decades. The area also sits close to where Sunderland AFC's old stadium, Roker Park, stood before the club moved to the Stadium of Light in 1997, and Seaburn gave its name to the Seaburn Casuals, one of the notorious football hooligan firms that attached itself to Sunderland in the 1980s. The shadow of that era has faded; the seafront crowds today are families and dog-walkers, not stone-throwing rivals.

In the late 1980s the old Seaburn Hall site was cleared and redeveloped into a Morrisons supermarket, a new amusement park, and a leisure and fitness centre. Before that, Seaburn Hall had been a dance hall and live music venue, built in 1939 as part of a seafront development scheme that also produced the funfair. For half a century it pulled in dancers and gig-goers, the kind of grand seaside variety venue that has mostly vanished from the British coast. The Lowry painting that now hangs in the Morrisons is in some ways a memorial to that earlier Seaburn, a reminder that the town once contained the kind of cultural infrastructure that warranted attention from a major painter.

For two and a half decades Seaburn hosted the Sunderland International Airshow, an event held over the coast at Seaburn and Roker that grew into the largest free airshow in Europe. Civilian and military aircraft performed over the beach: the Red Arrows trailing red, white, and blue smoke against the North Sea horizon, Spitfires and Lancasters rumbling overhead, fast jets cracking the air with their afterburners. Crowds spread along the sand and the clifftops, packing the promenade and the Roker headland. The airshow ran for years before economic and operational pressures finally ended it, but for a generation of Wearsiders the last weekend of July meant looking up. On the Tyne and Wear Metro, Seaburn has its own station, keeping the resort connected to Newcastle and the wider region all year round.