From 1999 to 2016, the centre of Sunderland had a hole in it. Vaux Breweries had brewed beer on the site for 110 years before closing in July 1999, leaving twenty-six acres of brownfield land facing the river. In 2001, Tesco bought the land for a hypermarket. The city council and its regeneration company wanted something else. The legal row that followed lasted until 2011, which is to say that the Vaux site sat empty for twelve years while two visions of city centre development argued in court. The argument shaped what eventually got built.
Vaux Breweries operated in central Sunderland from the 1880s, one of the great employers of the North East for more than a century. The Vaux Group merged with Wards of Sheffield in the post-war consolidations of British brewing. When Vaux finally closed in July 1999, it left the city without a brewery for the first time since the Victorian era and with twenty-six acres of high-value land waiting for a decision. The Group rebranded itself as the Swallow Group, focusing on its hotel arm, and was bought by Whitbread in the autumn of 2000. Vaux's name survived on the site - in 'Vaux Site', in the Vaux Bridge, in the streets that still remembered the brewery. The buildings did not.
Sunderland City Council had wanted to redevelop the site. Tesco's 2001 purchase of the land threatened to turn the centre of the city into a hypermarket - the kind of out-of-town anchor more usually found beside a ring road. The Urban Regeneration Company - Sunderland Arc - fought the case on behalf of the city, with backing from the Regional Development Agency, One Northeast and the national body Homes England. The dispute ran a full decade. In 2011 the city finally obtained ownership of the site. The eventual resolution was the kind of slow institutional victory that rarely gets a plaque: a city centre defended from a hypermarket by a partnership of councils and quangos, while the land itself stayed empty and weeds grew where the brewery had stood.
In 2014 the council formed a joint venture with construction giant Carillion to redevelop the land. This coincided with Keel Square - a public space designed to commemorate Sunderland's maritime heritage, completed in May 2015 - going up across from the site. Phase one of construction began in 2016, with a £25 million series of office buildings. Then in January 2018 Carillion collapsed in one of the largest UK corporate failures of the decade. The Vaux project survived; new contractors took over and the work continued. By the end of 2018 the first office building, known as The Beam, was complete and hosting tenants including the food delivery firm Ocado. A new City Hall followed in 2020, replacing the Civic Centre that had opened in 1970.
Plans for a new eye infirmary unit on the Vaux site were revealed in 2021, and as of October 2025 construction was underway. On 18 October 2025 the Keel Crossing - a footbridge linking the Vaux site to Sheepfolds and the Stadium of Light on the north bank - opened permanently, easing the matchday squeeze on Wearmouth Bridge. The eventual scheme calls for up to nineteen new buildings spanning offices, residential, retail and leisure. The pace has been the pace of regeneration everywhere: slower than promised, more contested than expected, more dependent on each contractor surviving than anyone planning the masterplan would have liked to admit. A quarter-century after Vaux closed, the site no longer looks like a wound. It looks, finally, like a city centre.
Located at 54.91°N, 1.39°W in central Sunderland on the south bank of the River Wear, just south of the Wearmouth Bridge and Stadium of Light. The newly opened Keel Crossing footbridge (October 2025) links the site to the north bank. Nearest airport: Newcastle (ICAO EGNT), 13 nautical miles north-northwest. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 feet; The Beam office building and Keel Square are key landmarks. North Sea coastal weather.