Sumptuous Sunderland: Looking up at the buildings
A tour of some of Sunderland's notable buildings, both old and new, with Ian Mole.
A highlight is the freshly restored and thoroughly unique 'Elephant Tea Rooms' building.
A highlight is the freshly restored and thoroughly unique 'Elephant Tea Rooms' building.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 My name's Ian Moore and I conduct walking tours around Sunderland.
00:04 Tour topics include Shipyard Girls, Lost Pubs of the 60s, Lost Cinemas, Lost Stores.
00:11 Today I want to talk about some of my favourite buildings in Sunderland.
00:15 Now if you go on Facebook a lot of people are saying, "Oh, Sunderland's a dump, it's a ghost town, there's nothing here."
00:21 I disagree. I think there's a lot of good things happening in the town at the moment.
00:25 And a lot of the old buildings are still here. Remember what Bearden Powell, the leader of the Scout Movement, said.
00:32 He said, "Always remember to look up. If you look up you might see some things you'd never noticed before."
00:38 So today I just want to talk about some of my buildings. Maybe they're not your favourites, but I'm sure some of them you will recognise.
00:45 The first one I want to talk about is the museum, just to my left here.
00:50 I always come to the museum a couple of times a week. I think it's a very good local museum.
00:56 It reflects very well our major industries, which of course are shipbuilding, coal mining, glass making, and something I'd never really thought about before, pottery.
01:06 They've got a gallery which is completely full of pottery made in the 19th and 20th century.
01:12 There were over 20 potteries on Weyerside at that time.
01:15 The building, as you can see from the foundation stone, it was laid in 1877 in the presence of ex-President of the United States, Ulysses Grant.
01:27 The original winter gardens at the back of the museum were based on the Crystal Palace in London.
01:32 But these were destroyed in 1941 by a Luftwaffe bomb.
01:36 The modern ones I really like and I always go in to see how the koi carp are getting on. They're getting bigger every time I go in.
01:42 I'm sure many people will know Wallace the Lion, maybe the most famous exhibit in the museum.
01:47 He's been here since the start really, 1879.
01:50 And in 1868 he attacked and mauled his trainer, but the trainer survived.
01:56 I still think he's got a bit of a dangerous look in his eyes.
01:59 So here we are on Fawcett Street and these two buildings behind me are two of my favourite buildings in Sunderland.
02:08 I talked earlier about remembering to look up and this is a case in point because I don't think I noticed these buildings until about 20 years ago.
02:15 They look like Angkor Wat on a very bad night, but at the moment nothing's happening upstairs.
02:21 They've been unoccupied for a long time.
02:23 But they were built in 1889 to 1891. You can see the dates on the building there.
02:28 They're named Sydenham House and Cawdor House.
02:31 They were designed by architect Frank Cawes.
02:34 Now he wasn't a local man, he came from the Isle of Wight actually, but he opened his practice in Sunderland in 1870.
02:40 He's probably better known for the elephant tea rooms which we'll see later on.
02:44 So the downstairs of this building until the mid-50s there was a well-known, very posh cafe restaurant called Meng's.
02:50 They had their own bakery and everything.
02:52 It's mentioned in, if you read the Shipyard Girls books, one of the Shipyard Girls and Helen, they were taken out for posh meals there.
03:01 So it was a very posh do if you went there.
03:03 My auntie had a wedding reception there, but it was a very small affair.
03:07 It was her and her husband and the witness and that was a lot.
03:10 Woolworths, everybody called it Woolies.
03:12 Now it's an art deco style building.
03:14 Wherever you go, the Woolies buildings look like this in my experience.
03:18 And it's famous for many other things, but Pick and Nick's and some naughty children, I think they thought it was called Pick and Nick.
03:26 Talking about shoplifting, about 1965, my sister's best friend from next door,
03:32 she was in here and she nicked a Monoptera badge.
03:36 Now a Monoptera, as some of you may recall if you're old enough,
03:39 they were like big butterfly creatures from an episode of Doctor Who.
03:44 It was the Monopteras and the Zarbys and the Animus controlled the whole planet.
03:48 Anyway, BBC were getting into the market and then saw this little black and gold badge that this nameless person put in a pocket and walked out onto John Street without paying for it.
03:58 But maybe with the spirit of the Doctor in mind, like to be good, she had a sort of pang of conscience and she went back in and she put it back on the shelf.
04:06 So this is probably my favourite building in Sunderland, the Elephant Tay Rooms.
04:13 It was designed by Frank Coors, as I mentioned before.
04:17 And the guy who owned the place was called William Grimshaw.
04:21 He was a local Tay merchant.
04:23 And if you read Bill Greenwell's book, The Elephant Tay Family, you can find out all about what happened.
04:29 So it was constructed in the 1870s, took quite a long time.
04:32 If you go on Facebook, there's a nice sequence of photographs of the building gradually getting higher and higher.
04:38 There's about seven or eight photographs.
04:40 Now in the 1960s, mid-60s, the bottom part of this building was all smashed out and replaced with glass windows.
04:47 It was owned, I believe at the time, by William and Glyn's Bank,
04:50 which is a bit ironic because the symbol of William and Glyn was an elephant.
04:54 You'd think they would have had more respect for the building, but that's what things were like in those days.
04:58 We were going to the moon and people weren't so bothered about what happened in the past.
05:02 So it's been lavishly restored and it's just about, I think it's completely finished now.
05:06 Very close to the original, not exactly the same as the original, but they've done a really nice job.
05:11 And the Sunderland History Library is now housed in this building.
05:15 So the nice block behind us is Hutchinson's Buildings.
05:18 They were constructed 1850, 1853.
05:21 So Ralph Hutchinson was a local shipbuilder and timber importer.
05:26 Now I imagine he was probably importing a lot of pit props.
05:30 It was a very big trade in those days from the Baltic countries.
05:33 I mean Hutchinson's Buildings, to be honest, is never a term that I use personally.
05:37 Everybody calls the corner "Maggie's Corner".
05:40 It was a popular place to meet people for a date in the 60s, 70s and long before that, I'm sure.
05:46 Maggie was a hat maker and people used to stand outside and watch them make hats in the window.
05:51 So it was a popular place for people to hang around anyway.
05:54 Of course, it's at the end of Fawcett Street, the main street.
05:57 Several new businesses have opened and sadly one or two have closed since the restorative.
06:00 But a great improvement on what was there before.
06:03 So another favourite building of mine is Montgomery Math Station.
06:07 It was constructed in 1848 during the time of George Hudson,
06:12 who was the MP for Sunderland at that time for about 15 years.
06:15 He was known as the Railway King.
06:17 He was involved in a huge amount of railway construction.
06:20 And he was the one who got the docks developed in Sunderland, the South Docks.
06:25 And the Hudson Dock is still there. It's named after him.
06:28 If you want to see what he looked like, there's a nice portrait of him in the Sunderland Museum.
06:33 These days it's the Fan Museum.
06:36 And Michael and the lads, they're very welcoming people.
06:39 It's got all sorts of artefacts from Sunderland Football Club over the days.
06:43 If you come here on match days, you can have a beer, sit outside at the picnic table, there's a barbie.
06:49 A personal family memory of this station.
06:52 In 1939, my mother had two sisters and my mum was nine years old.
06:57 They lived at the Wade Chief nearby.
07:00 And it was all arranged a long time before, but they got evacuated from here
07:05 down to a place called Driffield, which is in East Yorkshire, maybe North Humberside now.
07:12 So you can imagine the chaos, there's thousands of kids waiting to get on the trains
07:17 and lots of parents, mainly mums, seeing them off.
07:21 So my mum and her two sisters were inside the carriage talking out the window
07:25 and me bare mum, me grandma, appeared with tears running down her face
07:31 and three pasties held aloft and she put them through the window and off they went.
07:35 So I'm sure most of you will recognise where we are. It's St Peter's Church.
07:39 It's one of these places, it's the oldest building in Sunderland,
07:42 probably the most famous building in Sunderland. It's a World Heritage Site.
07:46 But I never went in, the first time I went in was about ten years ago.
07:50 You think, oh it's there, I'll go in next week and maybe you never get round to it.
07:53 But it's certainly worth a visit.
07:55 So it dates back to 674/675 and it was constructed on the orders of the Bishop of Northumbria,
08:02 Benedict Biscop. Try saying that when you're out of few pints.
08:06 And this is where the Venerable Bede lived in this area.
08:09 They had to import glass makers from France because we didn't have that technology in the country at that time.
08:15 Now what you see now, it's not much of a date from that time.
08:19 So the porch and the area around that, this is the original,
08:23 but it was heavily rebuilt in the 13th/14th century and in the 19th century.
08:28 In 1984 there was a big fire and much of the interior was damaged,
08:32 so a lot of that's been replaced since then.
08:35 If you read the Shipyard Girls books,
08:38 this is where Gloria and Jack would have their secret trysts in the porch just behind us.
08:43 So I remember reading in the 18th/19th centuries when the ships had a lot of ballast
08:48 and they chucked the ballast out when they arrived in port.
08:51 So St. Peter's was almost dwarfed by hills of ballast all over the place.
08:56 And apparently when they built the shipyards, the North Sands,
08:59 there was a lot of excavated sand, so there was little helix of sand all around here as well.
09:03 So I'm not quite sure where they went to, but I can't say any now.
09:06 Some of my favourite buildings in Sunderland are Pobers, which maybe says something about me.
09:10 But behind us you can see the Peacock, formerly known as the Londonderry until 2016,
09:16 and then restored and opened again in 2017.
09:20 It's a beautiful pober and fantastic facilities for listening to music,
09:24 nice food, they have bands on downstairs, Ruby and the Mystery Cats I saw there once.
09:29 A good place to come before and after the match.
09:32 So the Minster, as we know it, it's really known as the Minster Church,
09:35 the St. Michael and All the Angels and St. Benedict the Biscuit.
09:39 Sounds like a band from 1967, but everybody just says the Minster.
09:43 So this building, well, the origins of this building go back about a thousand years I think,
09:48 at least maybe earlier to Anglo-Saxon times, but what we can say now is really early 20th century.
09:54 I'm not a religious person myself, but I do love the building.
09:57 And every, I think it's the first Saturday of every month, they have a craft fair here
10:03 and sometimes I have a stall in here, so I'm quite acquainted with the building.
10:07 I do remember at school I went to Bede.
10:11 Every May I think it was, we used to have what we call a Founders' Day service.
10:15 I still don't know who the founder of the Bede was,
10:18 maybe because I used to go into a coma every time we came, it was a very, very boring day for me.
10:23 So this is a different kind of building, the Point across the way.
10:26 So it opened in 1937, it was called The Ritz, so it's a very big screen cinema.
10:32 And I remember it mainly from the early 60s when I used to go to the Sixth-Meet matinees.
10:38 So I spoke about it quite a bit on another video about Sunderland's lost cinemas.
10:42 It changed its name to the ABC in 1961 I think it was,
10:46 and then 1973 it became a two-screen cinema.
10:50 So they used the back part of the stalls to create a pub, the Painted Wagon.
10:54 So you know when you're a kid everything seems big,
10:57 and when you're an adult you go back and you think,
10:59 "God, that looks really small," especially if you've lived away from Sunderland a long time like me.
11:03 But this building still looks really big and impressive.
11:06 I've never been in Point, but the place is still alive.
11:09 So here we are outside a very controversial building I would say,
11:13 so the south end of Sunderland Station.
11:16 It opened back end of 2023.
11:20 Now personally I like it, I think it gives a good impression when you come into the city,
11:24 something big and bright, a bit like an airline terminal.
11:27 Of course it's not finished yet, and this is what a lot of people complain about,
11:30 it seems very naked. Well it does at the moment, admittedly.
11:33 I think we need to get a few shops in there,
11:36 and personally I would like to see some artwork on the wall.
11:40 I'm sure shops are planned to be there, and it'll look more filled out,
11:43 and more like a King's Cross or something, and a mini version in the future.
11:48 [Music]