Sunderland

Its difficult not to conclude that Sunderland currently gets a bad press. As if to confirm a suspicion, on the day of our visit regional TV was talking about the city having the highest reported rates of domestic abuse in the country. Employment and social problems go hand in hand, so its really no surprise that like many urban areas that made their wealth in times past, the present is visibly so much more of a struggle. Their raison d’etre has often long since evaporated.

Sunderland was of great interest to me. Chris’s great grandfather, Hugh Robert Jones, captained ships that were built here in the nineteenth century. In the case of the Province, Captain Jones made the journey from Liverpool in advance of construction to advise the builders, Doxford’s, just upstream at Pallion, about exactly what his employers required. The Province was a four-masted, iron-built ship of 1,800 tons. She was launched in 1886 and named by Hugh’s wife [and Chris’s great grandmother], Mrs Jane Jones [formerly Williams].

Our visit was primarily to Sunderland Maritime Heritage, run by a group of enthusiastic volunteers to collect and collate objects and documents that tell the story of Sunderland’s glorious and influential ship-building past. Located in the east end of the city and up the hill above the mouth of the River Wear, the building is not quite what you might expect. It occupies a considerable space inside a modern industrial unit and from the outside resembles a giant lock-up garage. Inside, however, it’s a hive of activity as skilled carpenters employ their skills in harness with a range of modern machinery, on all sorts of commissions that provide funds for the advancement of their collection.

We were shown round by Ian Murray, one of the trustees of the enterprise. We could not have had a better guide and I’m very grateful to Ian for giving his time so readily, even delegating to a colleague when someone came to discuss replacement carpets, following an unfortunate leak to the roof in the upstairs library and archive, just so that he could complete our tour for us. I left a copy of Seafarer Jones for their library, with the Jones connection explained and with thanks to Chris’s brother, David, who did the spade work on his family history, which I had then subsequently made use of.

We wandered back into the centre through modern replacement housing estates and then through some elegant and stately inner urban, stone-built terraces, where the successful entrepreneurs had lived, when the town was at the forefront of the industrial revolution, making use of the coal and iron that was on its doorstep, exporting its goods and building a new breed of ships in which to do so. George and Robert Stephenson came from round here and a number of early railways bringing coal down to the coast preceded even the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

We found a very presentable and welcoming café for lunch, where a large pizza and salad was advertised at pre-Covid prices at £6.00. Sunderland has obviously been hit hard by post-industrial trauma, but there is a lot of work going on in the centre to give it a facelift and some greater self-belief. The modern station of steel and glass with its a spacious entrance hall is a statement of intent, even though the platforms are sub-terranean and rather gloomy by comparison. I came away feeling that I really wanted Sunderland to find its way again before long. The people we met somehow deserve better. Just as long as that doesn’t involve recalling Jordan Pickford from Everton any time soon.