Sunderland Corporation built the station in 1901, in the era when British municipal authorities ran their own generating plants and lit their own streets. By 1923 it housed six 750 kilowatt reciprocating machines and three turbo-alternators at 2,000, 5,000 and 6,000 kilowatts, with a total capacity of 17,500 kilowatts. The boilers churned out 326,000 pounds of steam per hour. In a single year, the plant generated 18.747 gigawatt-hours and sold 15.319 of them for £128,326 - a tidy surplus of over £56,000 returned to the Corporation. The station was a civic asset before electricity was a national grid, and Sunderland's lights came on because Sunderland's leaders had committed to making them so.

Successive extensions added scale and sophistication. The eventual generating plant carried two Brush 20 megawatt turbo-alternators and two Fraser & Chalmers-GEC 10 megawatt units. The boiler house held three Clarke Chapman boilers running at 450 pounds per square inch and 850 degrees Fahrenheit, with smaller boilers from Vickers Spearing producing steam at lower pressures. These are the figures of an industrial age that took pride in pressure and temperature, in tonnes of coal moved and pounds of steam produced. The river beside the station carried colliers up from the staiths. The town across the river was building ships. Everything connected, and the power station sat at the centre of all the wires.

By the 1970s, the plant's 34 megawatts looked modest against the great new stations of the national grid. In October 1975, the Central Electricity Generating Board gave twelve months' notice of closure. The last switch was thrown on 25 October 1976. Demolition came in 1979, with the cooling tower brought down in February of that year - the kind of controlled implosion that draws crowds in the era of Fred Dibnah. Photographs from the Flickr archives show the great concrete cylinder folding into a cloud of its own dust. The site was cleared and, in time, a PC World retail outlet rose on the cleared ground, selling the machines that would replace the world of dockside cranes and turbo-alternators.

In 1962, L.S. Lowry painted Sunderland's dockside with the power station in the composition. Lowry, whose matchstick figures and industrial townscapes had documented the North West for decades, found in Sunderland the same elements he prized: the working river, the silhouettes of cranes and chimneys, the small figures going to and from their work. The painting hangs now in the Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, a few minutes' walk from the empty plot where its subject once stood. The station outlived itself in oil paint. Few of the people in the picture would have imagined that the museum would one day be the only place left to see the chimney that defined their skyline.