The bells are still somewhere. After the wreckers brought down Sunderland's Italianate town hall in 1971, the bells were saved from the clock tower and placed, as the council's own phrasing has it, in 'secure storage'. Fifty years later they are still there. The tower they hung in is long gone, and Cassaton House - retail units below, student bedrooms above - now occupies Fawcett Street where mayor Robert Shadforth opened the building on 6 November 1890. Half a century after the demolition, the Sunderland Echo reports that the loss is still considered a sore point. Bells in a box are a curious kind of monument: the city has them, but it doesn't have anywhere to ring them.
Sunderland had been a municipal borough since 1835. For half a century, councillors made do with the Exchange Building on High Street East, completed in 1814 to serve as market hall and courthouse. As Victorian Britain swelled the responsibilities of local government - drains, gas, schools, roads - the civic leaders concluded that they needed a building of their own. The foundation stone was laid by mayor Edwin Richardson on 29 September 1887. Brightwen Binyon, an Ipswich-based architect with a knack for civic competitions, designed the building in the Italianate manner. John and Thomas Tillman built it for around £50,000, a substantial sum for the time. By November 1890 the borough had its purpose-built seat, thirteen bays of dressed sandstone running along Fawcett Street.
The front was an exercise in Victorian rhetoric. A central round-headed doorway sat under a balcony carried on brackets. Above it a French door at first floor level was flanked by two pairs of Corinthian columns supporting an entablature and a small pediment. Behind rose a two-stage clock tower topped with a balustrade, corner finials, an ogee-shaped dome and a weather vane. The wings were rusticated on the ground floor, with sash windows under voussoirs below, round-headed windows above, and segmental-pedimented windows at attic level. The end sections projected forward and carried Venetian windows under modillioned cornices. Inside, the council chamber occupied the first floor, reached by a grand staircase and an ornate landing. Every detail of the building announced that Sunderland was a serious place that took itself seriously.
Edward, Prince of Wales - the man who would become and then unbecome Edward VIII - visited the town hall on 3 July 1930 during a tour of the area. Eleven years later, on the night of 9 April 1941, German bombs set the building alight during the Second World War. Sunderland was a major target: its shipyards were turning out a quarter of all British merchant tonnage during the war. The town hall burned, but it survived. When peace came, the mayor proclaimed victory from the very steps that had been scorched by incendiaries. The roll call of these two moments - a future king, a fire from the sky, a mayor's voice over a returning city - is the kind of biography only a civic building can have.
By the 1960s the council had outgrown Fawcett Street. A new civic centre opened in November 1970, and the old building stood empty. Civic leaders rejected every alternative proposal. Demolition came in 1971 - a decision Sunderland Echo readers were still calling a mistake fifty years later. Several schemes for a luxury hotel on the cleared site were considered and abandoned. The eventual replacement, Cassaton House, was student accommodation over shops. The bells went into their secret store. In November 2023 the Echo reported that they were 'being held in top secret location until decision made on its future', a phrasing that captures the strange limbo of a city that demolished its civic pride and has never quite stopped second-guessing itself.
Located at 54.91°N, 1.38°W on Fawcett Street in central Sunderland, North East England. The site is now occupied by Cassaton House, a few blocks south of the River Wear and the Wearmouth Bridge. Nearest airport: Newcastle (ICAO EGNT), 13 nautical miles north-northwest. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 feet; Fawcett Street runs north-south through the city centre and is easy to trace from the railway station up to the river. North Sea coastal weather, occasional low cloud.