The English high street: Sunderland – ‘I wasn’t surprised by the riots’

High Street Tyres, a boarded up business
Closed up and left to decay: High Street Tyres is a typical sight in a city that has been left behind - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph

Christopher Howse is travelling the nation to speak to local people about their high street. How it has changed and what they miss… This week, Christopher visited Sunderland before the disorder that took place there in recent days. This is his view on the high street in one of Britain’s most deprived areas.

As I stepped outside Sunderland’s new railway station, a man sitting on a shiny stone surrounded by some shrubs got up and shouted: “F––– off! F––– off!” It was not that he had recognised me. He was having an endless argument with another drunk man in the summer drizzle.

I was there on the eve of the riots that I didn’t know were going to happen – though when they happened, I wasn’t surprised. My exploration of Sunderland high street mixed horror and admiration. I disliked much that I saw, but at first sight I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I had to find out what was there before.

Take the railway station. Last year, a modest glassy entrance opened to the national rail and Newcastle Metro. It replaced makeshift arrangements made when the old station was bombed in 1943. It was within sight of the new station – between the police office and an amusement arcade – that Citizens Advice premises were burnt out last Friday.

The Metro reaches Newcastle in half an hour; getting to historic Durham, 12 miles up the river Wear, takes an hour. So I had stayed overnight in Newcastle. The cheery woman at reception asked: “You doing anything nice tomorrow?”

“Well, I’m going to Sunderland. Is that nice?

“Noo,” she replied.

Sunderland, long after coal and shipbuilding gave out, is not prosperous. Last year, 42,700 people or 24.8 per cent of those aged 16-64 were “economically inactive” and not seeking employment. That is worse than average in the North East and even worse than the average of 21.2 per cent in Great Britain as a whole.

Another way to judge is impressionistically. At the bus-stop outside a broken window in the Sir William Johnson pub (Wetherspoons) the people waiting looked poor. Their clothing was shabby: faded fleeces, discoloured jogging-bottoms, soiled trainers. Women’s hair was strained back into little pony tails, or frizzed and matted. Sores grew by lips. People looked tired. Mothers shouted at children.

I walked to the high street up Fawcett Street, past Wilko, a large branch, now closed. This was once Binns, a department store and flagship of a chain in the North East. “Shop at Binns,” said the trams. People did, until it was taken over by House of Fraser and closed in 1993.

Next to Binns, Sunderland suffered a loss that still rankles in many a heart: the town hall, opened in 1900 with a tall Baroque clock tower. In 1970 Sunderland council built itself new offices 400 yards down the road in a Civic Centre opened by Princess Margaret. It gave developers permission for a hotel on the site of the old town hall, which was demolished in February 1971.

But the hotel project fell through. Virgin Money, a nail bar and a low-key post office sit on the site. As for the Civic Centre, upkeep proved expensive and demolition began in 2022.

On the other side of Fawcett Street is a weird symbol of Sunderland’s municipal pride and decay. The ornate five-storey Corder House in red terracotta displays balconies, mullioned cusped windows and a conical roof. It was the work of the local architect Frank Caws in 1890. Now the red front is festooned with green weeds and yellow flowers. Ragwort, I thought. At ground floor level, a glaring blue plastic fascia proclaims Furniture Express, permanently closed.

The red terracotta building above a boarded up Furniture Express and covered in weeds
'A weird symbol of Sunderland's municipal pride and decay' - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph

At the top of Fawcett Street, the long high street runs west and east. It was a sort of tie-beam holding Sunderland together. Over the Wear to the north still stands St Peter’s church, built in 674 AD. That is Monkwearmouth. Here, south of the river, Bishopwearmouth belonged to the Bishop of Durham. The high street connected it to the old port of Sunderland.

A cheering fantasia where Fawcett Street joins the high street is also by Frank Caws, from 1873 – the Elephant Tea Rooms, in endearing “pub-Gothic with Hindoo touches”. The touches are stone elephants with tea-chests on their backs. In a recent restoration, their trunks were repaired.

The Elephant Tea Rooms, completed in 1877,  were designed by architect Frank Caws for William Grimshaw, a local tea merchant and grocer
The Elephant Tea Rooms, completed in 1877, were designed by architect Frank Caws for William Grimshaw, a local tea merchant and grocer - Heathcliff O'Malley

I found High Street West filled with stalls for a food festival. Normally it is a pedestrianised succession of undistinguished chain shops: McDonald’s, Poundland, Sports Direct, a big Primark. Marks and Spencer closed in May. The council stepped in to buy the closed Mothercare and Argos, but it can’t simply make retail outlets succeed.

On the corner of the new Keel Square, the Edwardian Baroque entrance from the former public baths is preserved, tacked on to the post-modern Gilbridge House office block.

It adjoins the big site of the Vaux brewery, closed in 1999, demolished and earmarked by the council for redevelopment in partnership with Carillion. But Carillion went bust in 2018. The council has since built itself £42 million offices here on the ring road, to replace those in the Civic Centre.

Sunderland's £42 million new City Hall
Sunderland's £42 million new City Hall opened in November 2021 - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph

Walking eastward down the high street towards the old docks by the North Sea is an alienating experience on surface, with a historical puzzle beneath. Once past the remains of proud Victorian commerce, I encountered Sunderland Bowl, a bowling alley from 2009. It presents “lifeless facades devoid of articulation”, in the words of the Pevsner volume on Co Durham revised by Martin Roberts. Opposite, the backside of the telephone exchange butts into the high street, entryless and dirty, “as welcome as a nuisance call”.

Then the shops give out. The last is the sun-bleached Polish Delicious Food. Beyond are acres of grass where buildings once stood. Uneasy emptiness is the feel. High Street Tyres is emblematic, a Victorian terraced house, shuttered and closed, its upper floors boarded up.

Anything here surviving from the 19th century is welcome. Numbers 170 to 175, from about 1800, once derelict and grass-grown, are now spruced up. Two years ago a community interest company established Pop Recs music venue here, also selling “Still Hate Thatcher” T-shirts.

The high street continues into the East End beyond the Chinese Wall of the ring road. Past the Salvation Army hostel stands the Eagle pub, a splendid Victorian establishment until 1920. A big sculpted eagle on the gable disappeared but was remade in 2002.

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Demolition in the East End predated the Luftwaffe. Sunderland was the seventh most bombed city in Britain. In two raids in 1943, 534 houses were ruined. But even before the war, “slum clearance” gained pace, with 1,455 properties included in the programme by 1934.

The socialist author Vera Brittain, Shirley Williams’s mother, saw “terrible slums, and crowded rooms with indescribable bedding”. Even by 1945, 43 per cent of houses lacked their own running water.

Sunderland did not lose all its attractive old riverside houses, warehouses and wharfs in the 19th century. Between High Street East and the Wear, a project to build a deep-water quay, to counter unemployment (36 per cent by 1932), destroyed 155 houses in Low Street and the 17th-century Custom House. Nearby, the former Exchange, built in 1812, has been unattractively restored and is now empty.

Today the Garths are the biggest invisible presence for anyone with memories from 40 years ago. These great hollow squares of housing on four floors had balconies curved at the ends in the Moderne style. The half dozen blocks were demolished in the 1990s. “There is no other place that I would have rather had my childhood,” declares Julie Ormsby, who started an online site for former residents.

Meanwhile three 19-storey blocks, Lumley, Lambton and Londonderry towers were built in the 1960s beside the high street. Since reclad, they are owned by the housing association Gentoo. This is a successor to the housing group to which Sunderland council sold an astonishing 36,356 council homes in 2001 for £219.8 million. By 2018, it had built 2,300 new homes and demolished 3,898 old ones. In 2024, 5,262 domestic properties altogether were empty in Sunderland.

Lumley, Lambton and Londonderry towers
Lumley, Lambton and Londonderry towers were built in the 1960s beside the high street

Before the high street meets the fenced-off docks, stand three remnants, almost like theatre sets, from 18th-century Sunderland. A beautiful brick house, 10 Church Street, five bays across, was built in 1710. It is now surprisingly a bar for bikers called Angels Place. The house next door from the same period is the Eastern Dragon takeaway.

By weed-grown cobbles stands Holy Trinity church, completed in 1727, “redundant” and cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust. Coffee and cake are on sale. A men’s group was finishing a morning meeting. People like somewhere to talk.

All around is quiet low-rise modern housing with daunting expanses of rough-mown grass. Half a mile to the south in Ridley Street survive 150-year-old Sunderland cottages, in single-storey terraces, each with a back yard, a favourite local design. Built for miners and shipyard workers, they kept the shape and community coherence that the high street lacks.

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Which English high street would you like to see featured?