Growth of the Town,

Transcription

1 Growth of the Town, Industrial sites The vulnerability of Sunderland s heavy industries had been ruthlessly exposed in the 1930s. After a period of relative prosperity following the end of war in 1945, within 20 years the fault lines again began to show. While there were periods of respite for shipbuilding, the battle was now against foreign competitors. So when the last Sunderland shipyard closed in 1988, this time there was no suggestion that yards could be put on ice pending an upturn. No visible trace remains of shipbuilding. A century earlier, the modernization of this industry had refashioned the riverside landscape; now, with its death, the town underwent a further physical transformation. The end of mining in the district contributed to upheaval, for as well as the disappearance of the collieries themselves between 1966 and 1993, there were redundant quays, drops, staiths and railways, all the means by which coal had been exported from the town. 1 The harbour scene was at the eye of this transformative storm, but there were implications for the whole waterfront from the South Dock as far as Pallion and Southwick. Shipbuilding had already ended at Hylton, in Through the interwar slump, and into the post-war period, there had survived eight shipyards with worldwide reputations, four engine works besides Doxford, and a myriad of supporting forges, foundries and other workshops around the town. Bartram's shipyard was on the ocean side of the South Dock; J.L. Thompson at North Sands yard; just west of this at the Strand Slipway, and next to Folly End, John Crown; S.P. Austin s yard and pontoon at the Panns; Laing's yard at Deptford; Doxford s complex of six berths and engine works at Pallion, with Pickersgill on the north bank opposite; and most westerly, Short Bros, above Doxford on the south side of the river. 3 After 1990 little remained but the Liebherr crane-building shed at Deptford, and an undercover shipyard at Pallion. 4 By the mid 1980s, Wearmouth Colliery was the only source of coal exports from Sunderland. Any surviving colliery railways and riverside staiths were surplus to requirements. Most of the Hetton railway had closed in 1959, though the National Coal Board kept open a section from North Moor to the landsale depot at Hylton Road until The last coal from Hetton staiths was shipped in Silksworth coal was transported via Lambton staiths, which were closed and dismantled in The Wearmouth staiths were by 1970 used only to move pit waste for tipping at sea. With the closure of Wearmouth Colliery itself in 1993, its own staiths, trains, depots and railway offices suffered the final collateral damage. 5 Industrial regeneration proved a long and challenging process. There was some success in the post-war period with government-sponsored factories in Pallion trading estate, followed by a similar scheme at lower Southwick, across the river. 6 Since the early 1970s, when the A19 bypass effectively replaced the river as Wearside s major conduit of trade, the most significant developments have been located on the fringes of Sunderland, close to the new road. In 1962 the council bought the former Usworth aerodrome, renovated and reopened it as Sunderland

2 airport. The runway proved too short for commercial flying, and it closed in At this time, the Nissan Motor Co. was looking to open a new factory in the North East, and took over a 297-a. site at the airport, a little beyond the A19 towards Washington. From its opening in 1986, the Nissan works rose from nothing to become Britain s largest car producer. The Doxford International Business Park, also adjacent to the A19, was another success story in terms of job creation in the service and administrative sectors, making the city the call centre capital of Britain. 7 Doxford Park closed to new businesses in The Sunderland Echo s editorial offices and printing works relocated from the town centre as the bypass neared completion in 1974, moving to Pennywell, near the spectacular box girder bridge high above the ancient ferry site at Hylton. 8 With modern commerce prizing above all access to the A19 bypass, the riverside territory that had been the traditional base of industry and focus of interest for many centuries, fell out of favour. Land and buildings near the harbour, too piecemeal and problematic for modern needs, had lost their desirability once the river was no longer much used, and could not compete with those flat sites neighbouring main roads available elsewhere in the city. The eastern relief road, opened in , was designed to provide a coastal route direct to the Port of Sunderland from the south, so that heavy traffic avoided the city centre. Consequently it offered little to the blighted river corridor. 9 When the Vaux brewery closed in 1999 after 170 years, the redevelopment of its 26- acre site, on the fringe of the retail centre and in a commanding position above the Lambton drops, was seen as a potential new business district which could drive a regeneration of the riverside. Instead the brewery land was acquired by Tesco, who planned a large supermarket there. There was a concerted local campaign against this, which was ultimately successful. Tesco s proposal was widely resisted across the community and within the city council, which owns the adjacent Galley s Gill, formerly the rector s glebeland. But more than a decade after the Vaux closure, the cleared site, now itself in council ownership, still awaits redevelopment. 10 Commercial and shopping districts By the 1960s, a segregation had developed between the town s main commercial and retail zones. East of Fawcett Street, the fine streets of Sunniside passed through several phases, beginning as a highly desirable, exclusively residential area, until more commercial and public elements began to intrude. After this, houses were divided into offices, and residential properties became a small minority. Typical of the area was John Street, in 1850 composed entirely of private houses with high rateable values; by 1892 the street had gained a lecture hall, the county court building, several offices, and many subdivided properties. In 1960 it was at the centre of the town s main office and commercial quarter. 11 The shopping centre altered little before the 1960s, and although rebuilding had taken place, some damage from the blitz remained in evidence. A temporary bus station in Union Street, near the town hall, was in use from 1951 to The

3 Binns department store was rebuilt in 1952 on the west side of Fawcett Street, and in 1962 was connected by subway to a new extension across the road. Joplings, which had lost its High Street premises to fire in 1954, re-opened on the site of St Thomas s church in There were other department stores, and several national chains. Littlewoods built their new shop on the former north entrance to the station, part of a cluster of large retailers, including the Co-op, developing on High Street West. 13 The town centre underwent a major redevelopment during , when a pedestrian zone was created between Fawcett Street and Crowtree Road. The scheme included three 19-storey blocks of flats besides 77 shops, a new bus station, a rebuilt Jacky White s market, and multi-storey car park. A grid of small streets of shops and houses was lost to this new centre and to a subsequent more modern, covered mall, The Bridges, which extended the retail area in After the closure of Binns in 1992, the Bridges was doubled in size, including a new department store. This involved the loss of Crowtree Road, more streets, and the bus station, and took the shops as far as the Crowtree Leisure Centre, built in The bus station moved to Park Lane, where it was incorporated with a later metro stop into a new transport interchange in 1999, on the threshold of the civic centre. 14 Local shopping centres flourished on the outskirts, with modern shopping parades appearing on several new estates. The likes of Hendon, Pallion, Southwick and Fulwell had branches of local and national retailers, as well as banks, and in some cases cinemas. Monkwearmouth bucked the trend, its old centre down at heel and increasingly dissected and isolated by roads which sent traffic elsewhere. 15 Public buildings: While the new civic centre, by Sir Basil Spence, , was seen as a marked improvement on other modern public and business architecture in the town, the council s reputation was damaged in 1971 when it demolished the old town hall. Just as this distinguished municipal building had symbolized Fawcett Street s ascendancy 80 years earlier, so its loss was a reminder of the street s decline as the main thoroughfare. Relocating public administrative functions outside the very centre of town, to a site on Burdon Road facing Mowbray Park, also contributed to a fragmentation of central Sunderland. 16 Meanwhile, town centre redevelopments moved the focus further from Fawcett Street, and more so in the 1980s, contributing to a decline in High Street West. A hotel intended to replace the town hall was never built, and the loss of the Victorian building continues to be felt as a blow to local pride and identity. Further, the Grand Hotel in Bridge Street closed in 1969, and intentions to develop new hotel facilities resulted only in a rather less grand Travelodge, opened in 2003 on the site of Low Row, Bishopwearmouth. 17 With the closure of the eastern Binns shop on Fawcett Street, the council transferred the main city library and arts centre there from Borough Road in Meanwhile the Mowbray Gardens project, refurbishing the park and museum and re-building the winter gardens, was completed in 2001 and opened by the Queen in the following year. 18

4 The technical college building of 1901 and the Priestman library which augmented its facilities in 1939, both on Green Terrace, were central to the new Sunderland Polytechnic, founded in The Chester Road campus expanded to accommodate the polytechnic s main buildings through the 1970s and 1980s, and continues to grow. After university status was granted in 1992, a new riverside campus developed at St Peter s, on the site of Thompson s shipyard at Monkwearmouth Shore. Student accommodation was built in various locations, around Chester Road and on the waterside at Bishopwearmouth Panns. 19 Transport and traffic: The tramlines which had connected the suburbs to the centre, and run along many of the central streets, disappeared after trams were taken out of service in That same decade, most ferries also ceased operation. Roads were improved, to cater for rapidly increasing private traffic. The first phase of the inner ring road was the section called St Mary s Way, built in 1969 close to Bishopwearmouth s medieval centre, and further extended during the 1990s. The central railway station, reconstructed in 1953 and altered in 1966, when the old entrance was replaced by Littlewood s store, remained an uninspiring building with poor facilities. Not until 2002 was the Tyne and Wear metro extended from Pelaw into Sunderland, and as far as South Hylton, with seven new stations across the city. 20 Post-war clearances and house-building The housing shortage in 1945 was critical. Programmes of demolition and rebuilding had been suspended for the duration of the war, and the blitz was responsible for destroying 1,200 homes and damaging a further 35,000. Slum clearance did not resume until 1953, as the more urgent priority was to provide new houses. Initially, prefabs offered some solution, the first of these built in 1945 at Hendon. Some of this supposedly temporary housing was modernised in the 1970s and survived into the following century. 21 Once restarted, large-scale demolition continued through the 1960s. While intended to remove unfit housing, some had the effect also of freeing land for industrial expansion, meanwhile moving homes away from environmental pollution, as with the area of Pallion close to Doxford s. 22 According to the 1951 census, 43% of households shared a water supply, or had no piped water at all. More than half had no bath. The most packed part of town was Deptford, with a density of 45 people per acre. 23 Even in the 1960s, the condition of some of the demolished properties was described as disgusting - shared accesses, subdivided housing, lacking electricity and laundry facilities. Between 1960 and 1965, 1,100 families were moved from the Dock Street area of Monkwearmouth, that developed by Sir Hedworth Williamson in the 1850s, and 1,000 more from The Parade and Bramwell Street, between Hendon Road and the South Dock. 24 These households from around the port were by and large relocated to the outer suburbs. Between 1951 and 1959, 10,000 houses were built, at an astonishing rate which rapidly transformed the fringes of town from open fields to homogenous

5 council estates. By 1966, development had spread outwards as far out as the expanded borough boundary, to the present A19 western bypass. Among the 20,800 post-war homes constructed during this time, there were 4,400 tenements, but most of those in the suburbs were semi-detached houses with gardens and grassed open spaces surrounding. With such strong emphasis on public building, as the local authority attempted to counter Sunderland s reputation for crowded and unhealthy housing, the commercial sector managed to complete a rather more modest 4,000 private houses over the same period. 25 During this era there were built Pennywell, Grindon, Springwell Farm, Thorney Close, Farringdon, Carley Hill, Witherwack, Hylton Castle, Hylton Red House and Town End Farm estates. Town End alone, completed in the mid-1960s around the site of Hylton s lost medieval village, contained 2,342 houses and flats, and 8,000 people. For all their modernity, the houses had old-fashioned features such as cold storage larders, soon made obsolete by refrigerators. A workmen s club, built in 1962, gave focus to the community, as did a junior school and two pubs. The Hylton Castle estate received its first tenants in 1953, continuing to expand after that for more than a decade. As well as club and pubs, facilities eventually included a police station with officers houses adjoining, library, health centre, and a row of shops in the centre of the estate. 26 In the 1960s, the council adopted new styles of housing which had come into vogue. Doxford Park, far from town between Silksworth and the present A19 bypass, was the final major development, a small shopping mall accompanying a mix of council and private properties with troublesome flat roofs. In the very centre of Sunderland, new building and refurbishment included spectacular high-rises which radically changed the skyline. There were three such multi-storey blocks in the east end, and others near St Peter s in Monkwearmouth, as well as the three residential blocks developed as part of the central retail scheme, overlooking the new pedestrian zone and high-rise car park. Gilley Law estate (1964-7) was a mixed development that included high-rise flats and maisonettes near Silksworth, the heating system there designed to use locally mined coal. After 1974, the major extension of the borough boundaries brought Washington New Town into Sunderland. This vast estate belonged to a development corporation, falling into council ownership in All Sunderland s council housing was transferred to the Sunderland Housing Group in The Group embarked on further house building and renovation, including in the Sunniside area. 27 Conservation and regeneration By the late 1960s, there was concern that the demolition campaign had moved beyond slum properties, and was threatening owner-occupied houses in relatively good condition. Proposals to demolish streets of Sunderland cottages at Millfield in 1967 brought a groundswell of protest in the neighbourhood, and led to the formation of the Millfield Residents Association. It secretary was Norman Dennis, a Sunderland-born sociology lecturer at Newcastle University, who developed an academic interest in housing and town planning and in 1971 became Labour councillor for Millfield. Dennis argued that the clearance programme was flawed,

6 insensitive, and took little account of residents views. The community s view eventually prevailed, changing attitudes and exerting a wider influence upon local planning policies. The focus moved in the 1970s towards declaring General Improvement Areas, and later Housing Action Areas, to upgrade housing and make environmental improvements in districts of older private houses, including parts of Roker, Hendon and Southwick. 28 More recently, the loss of iconic buildings and street scenes has been keenly felt. Most notable among these was the town hall, but the 1930s Garths tenements and older East End streets have aroused similar sentiments. Many people in the city, and ones much further afield, have family roots in the East End, and an emotional connection there. While the streets have been partially rebuilt with considerable numbers of public-sector houses, the post-war fall in population and loss of industry around the port has meant the closures of harbour ferry, primary school, market and most shops. The port itself remains out of public bounds behind concrete fencing, its renewed prosperity hidden from an East End that bears an overwhelming air of decay. 29 Historic buildings and heritage assets across the city are now increasingly viewed as tools of regeneration. The Exchange has been restored as a bar and restaurant, Fulwell mill, Ryhope pumping engine and Monkwearmouth station refurbished as museums. Williamson s lime kilns have been rescued and feature on Southwick s riverside pathway. Hylton Castle, the church of Holy Trinity, and the town moor orphan asylum, are all subject of schemes intended to revive them for a variety of community purposes. The re-fitted Donnison school, rescued from dereliction, operates as a hub for local history. Hudson s long-neglected dock office, the sole remaining building from the South Dock s initial phase, has been saved from ruin by the port authority. But most of the structures which marked the activities of an older port and encapsulated its distinctive and distinguished history have disappeared. Prominent industrial sites on the waterfront have tended to follow cycles of dereliction, clearance, and re-use. A new generation of landmarks represents modern commerce, far removed from the heavy industry and seafaring of the past. Where the Wearmouth colliery was, is now one of the city s most recognisable features, Sunderland AFC s Stadium of Light, built in 1997, with the neighbouring Olympic-sized swimming pool of The National Glass Centre, museum, workshops and exhibition centre, opened in 1998 on North Sands, the site of Thompson s shipyard. Towards the north pier and Roker, the new marina is surrounded by modern waterside homes, on that part of Monkwearmouth Shore cleared for shipyards in the 1870s. St Peter s campus accommodates an increasing range of university activities, including some which have moved from older college buildings in Bishopwearmouth. 30 On the site of Bede s monastery, once a European centre of learning, new aspects of education are alive on the banks of the Wear. Behind it, by far the oldest structure in Sunderland, the church of St Peter, is again revealed, by the removal of ballast heaps and bulldozing of terrace houses and shipyards. St Peter s and its sister monastery in Jarrow expect to be inscribed in UNESCO s list of world heritage sites in 2012.

7 1 Cross ref. econ hist. 2 Cross ref shipbuilding 3 N.L. Middlemiss, British Shipbuilding Yards 1. North-East Coast (1993), Curtis, 54-5; Sinclair, 12, 65, Sinclair, 48, 55, 62-3, 140, 89-90; Mountford, 137; Corfe, 84; cross ref coalmining; railways 6 Robson, Urban Analysis, 101, 107, ; Sinclair, 13-14; The North East: a Programme for Regional Development and Growth (1963), 18 7 Sinclair, 91-3, 64-5, 146; RTP, 202-3; Brett, Sinclair, 92-3, 84, 134; RTP, City of Sunderland, Transport Policies and Programme, and Sinclair, 90-1, 93; The Times, 2 Aug. 1999; Northern Echo, 20 Aug. 1999; Guardian, 9 Mar. 2006; Observer, 26 Feb. 2006; Sund. Echo, 2 Mar Robson, Urban Analysis, 101, 107, ; Sinclair, 13-14; The North East: a Programme for Regional Development and Growth (1963), Sinclair, Sinclair, Sinclair, 45-8, 79-80, 93-5; Pevsner, 457-8; RTP, Sinclair, Pevsner, 452-3; Corfe, 87; cross ref public buildings. 17 Sinclair, 80-1; RTP, Corfe 87, 89; Sinclair, 94, Pevsner, 453; Sinclair, 78-9, 99; cross ref education. 20 T&WAS, 209/246; 209/256; Sinclair, 40, 48-51, 84-5, 94, 96-7, 80; Corfe, 89; City of Sunderland, Transport Policies and Programme, and ; cross ref railways. 21 Sinclair, N. Dennis, People and Planning: the Sociology of Housing in Sunderland (1970), 166; Sinclair, Sinclair, 38; RTP, Dennis, People and Planning, Dennis, People and Planning, 215; RTP, 199; Sinclair, Sinclair, 39-41, 75-7; Robson, Urban Analysis, 96-8; Corfe, 85-6; Brett, Hylton, 34-40, Sinclair, 74-7, 80-1, 71, 136, 97-8; Corfe, 85-6; Robson, Urban Analysis, 97-8; RTP, , Obituary of Norman Dennis, Guardian, 29 Nov. 2010; obit. John Blackburn, Guardian, 6 Feb. 2006; Dennis, People and Planning, esp ; Sinclair, 74-5; RTP, Sinclair, 142-3; RTP, 200-1; G.Cookson, Sunderland Heritage Quarter: Options for Heritage-Driven Regeneration in the East End of Sunderland (Report for Sunderland Heritage Forum and Sunderland City Council, 2009) (copy in Sund. Lib.). 30 Sinclair, 126-7, 137-9, 142-3; Corfe, 89; Curtis, 54