In Sunniside's heyday the Netherlands had a consulate here. So did Denmark, and so did Russia. This was the eastern edge of the city centre in the late nineteenth century, when Sunderland was a shipbuilding capital and merchant insurers wanted offices a few minutes from the river. The consulates handled paperwork for sailors and merchants moving between Wearside and the Baltic, North Sea, and beyond. A century later, when the ships had gone and the insurers had drifted west to the new commercial buildings, the same streets emptied into urban decay. The neighbourhood is now reinventing itself for the third time.
Sunniside grew up in the Victorian era as the original business centre of Sunderland. At the height of the city's shipbuilding power, most of the mercantile insurance and reinsurance companies were based here, alongside other functions that knit the port to its customers. Foreign consulates clustered too - the Netherlands, Denmark, Russia - because so much of the work of shipping was the work of documents. The old General Post Office building still stands between West Sunniside and Norfolk Street, now converted to residential use. The area was also the historic heart of Sunderland's legal and real estate trades, with solicitors and estate agencies whose successors are still based here today. It was the kind of district where men in wing collars walked from office to office at a brisk pace.
When Sunderland's economic fortunes faded in the 1980s, the lucrative businesses left first. Insurance offices moved west to new commercial buildings in the city centre or out to business parks. Solicitors followed, or merged. The shipping trade that had given Sunniside its purpose contracted toward closure - the last shipyard shut in December 1988. By the 1990s the area was plagued by what the planners politely called urban decay: shuttered Victorian frontages, weeds in the gutters, the slow withdrawal of every reason to come here. The streets that had housed consulates now housed empty offices. In the late 1990s the city council marked Sunniside as a priority for urban renewal, which is what councils say when they want to try again.
In 2003, Sunderland Arc - the city's regeneration company - released a fifteen-year plan for the district. The work moved in stages with the One Northeast regional development corporation. The first major piece was the rebuilding of Sunniside Gardens, completed in 2007 with a modern iconic sculpture as centrepiece. New bars and cafes followed. In 2008 a six-million-pound arts centre opened with the studiously lower-cased name ThePlace, anchoring the area as a creative quarter. The Empire Cinema occupies the Sunniside Leisure complex on Lambton Street. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors gave the area its North East Renaissance Award in 2008, and the Landscape Institute Awards recognised the public realm work in 2007. Two awards do not undo three decades, but they mark the turn.
The film company Tanner Films set up in Sunniside in 2008, signalling that the regeneration was attracting more than restaurants. Their crime drama King of the North, starring Angus MacFadyen, secured a six-million-pound deal at the Cannes film festival. The Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art is here, and visitors who came for an exhibition often discover that the surrounding streets retain something of their Victorian density and grain. What used to be office blocks for shipping insurance now host studios, residential conversions, and small businesses. The neighbourhood works precisely because it never quite committed to a single identity - mercantile then derelict then cultural, all of those layers still readable in the brick.
Located at 54.91°N, 1.38°W on the east side of central Sunderland, bounded by Fawcett Street to the west and Borough Road to the south. The Sunniside Leisure complex is the most visible feature - look for the cinema and adjacent multi-storey car park. Nearest airport: Newcastle (ICAO EGNT), 13 nautical miles north-northwest. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 feet. North Sea coastal weather; haze common.