By the 1960s, the old Sunderland Town Hall had become too small for an expanding local authority. Civic leaders wanted something modern - a building that would announce a forward-looking Sunderland and consolidate scattered departments under one roof. They chose a site in Burdon Road that had been a residential area called West Park. The commission went to Basil Spence, working through his practice Spence Bonnington & Collins - the architect who had given Coventry its new cathedral after the war. Construction began in January 1968. The building cost £3.4 million, used red brick in unusual abundance for its style, and arranged itself as two connected hexagons on a north-south axis with continuous glazing on each floor sandwiched between bands of brickwork. The civic suite, containing the council chamber, jutted out to the south-west and gave the council its own small architectural emphasis.

The building drew royalty. Princess Margaret opened it in 1970. After Sunderland received city status in 1992, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh visited on 18 May 1993 to unveil the new city's coat of arms. Then, on 5 March 2010, a more local kind of consecration took place. David Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners' Association, unveiled a large stained glass window above the entrance to the council chamber. The window had been designed by Dan Savage to mark 25 years since the UK miners' strike of 1984-85. In a city whose surrounding coalfield had defined its economy for two centuries and whose pits had all closed by the early 1990s, the window was a piece of civic memory built into the civic building.

Two strands of opinion fought over the Civic Centre's last years. The Council said it was simply too big and too expensive to maintain - a 1970s building with 1970s heating, 1970s glazing, and a sprawling floorplate that no longer fit a slimmed-down local authority. They proposed knocking it down and using the site for housing. The 20th Century Society and the wider architectural conservation movement said this was exactly the kind of loss Britain kept making and regretting. In January 2021 The Guardian put the Civic Centre on its list of Brutalist buildings most at risk of demolition. Simon Phipps included it in Brutal North, his photographic survey of post-war modernism in northern England. The Council went ahead anyway. Construction of a replacement City Hall, on the former Vaux Breweries site, had begun in October 2019.

Demolition began in October 2022 and ran to June 2023. By then Sunderland City Council had already moved to its new home, an architecturally less ambitious but functionally tighter City Hall, on the site of the brewery that had defined Sunderland's beer trade until its 1999 closure. The Civic Centre site is being redeveloped for housing - 265 new homes, according to the Sunderland Echo's coverage of the early demolition. The argument the building's defenders had made - that you cannot replace what you lose, only build something else in its place - now plays out as the new houses go up where the hexagons used to stand. The David Hopper stained glass window was preserved and removed before demolition. The miners' memorial survives, even if the council chamber it once illuminated does not.