Sunderland

Sunderland () is a port city in Tyne and Wear, England. It is the City of Sunderland's administrative centre and in the historic county of Durham. The city is from Newcastle-upon-Tyne and is on the River Wear's mouth to the North Sea. The river also flows through Durham roughly south-west of Sunderland City Centre. It is the only other city in the county and the second largest settlement in the North East after Newcastle upon Tyne.

Locals from the city are sometimes known as Mackems. The term originated as recently as the early 1980s; its use and acceptance by residents, particularly among the older generations, is not universal. At one time, ships built on the Wear were called "Jamies", in contrast with those from the Tyne, which were known as "Geordies", although in the case of "Jamie" it is not known whether this was ever extended to people.

There were three original settlements by the River's mouth which are part of the modern-day city: Monkwearmouth, settled in 674 on the river's north bank with King Ecgfrith of Northumbria land granting to Benedict Biscop to found a monastery which, together with Jarrow monastery, later formed the dual Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey; Sunderland, settled in 685; and Bishopwearmouth, founded in 930. The later two are on the Wear's southern bank. The second settlement on the wear's mouth grew as a fishing settlement and later as a port, being granted a town charter in 1179. The city started to trade coal and salt with ships starting to be built on the river in the 14th century. By the 19th century, with a population increase due to shipbuilding, port and docks, the town absorbed the other two settlements. Following decline of its traditional industries in the late 20th century, the area became an automotive building centre, science-and-technology and the service sector. In 1992, the borough of Sunderland was granted city status.

Toponymy

In 685, King Ecgfrith granted Benedict Biscop a "sunder-land". Also in 685 The Venerable Bede moved to the newly founded Jarrow monastery. He had started his monastic career at Monkwearmouth monastery and later wrote that he was "ácenned on ''sundorlande'' þæs ylcan mynstres" (born in a ''separate land'' of this same monastery). This can be taken as "sundorlande" (being Old English for "separate land") or the settlement of Sunderland. Alternatively, it is possible that Sunderland was later named in honour of Bede's connections to the area by people familiar with this statement of his.

History

Early, ancient and Medieval

The earliest inhabitants of the Sunderland area were Stone Age hunter-gatherers and artifacts from this era have been discovered, including microliths found during excavations at St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth. During the final phase of the Stone Age, the Neolithic period (c. 4000 – c. 2000 BC), Hastings Hill, on the western outskirts of Sunderland, was a focal point of activity and a place of burial and ritual significance. Evidence includes the former presence of a cursus monument.

It is believed the Brythonic-speaking Brigantes inhabited the area around the River Wear in pre-Roman Britain. There is a long-standing local legend that there was a Roman settlement on the south bank of the River Wear on what is the site of the former Vaux Brewery, although no archaeological investigation has taken place.

In March 2021, a "trove" of Roman artefacts were recovered in the River Wear at North Hylton, including four stone anchors, a discovery of huge significance that may affirm a persistent theory of a Roman Dam or Port existing at the River Wear.

Recorded settlements at the mouth of the Wear date to 674, when an Anglo-Saxon nobleman, Benedict Biscop, granted land by King Ecgfrith of Northumbria, founded the Wearmouth–Jarrow (''St Peter's'') monastery on the north bank of the river—an area that became known as Monkwearmouth. Biscop's monastery was the first built of stone in Northumbria. He employed glaziers from France and in doing he re-established glass making in Britain.
In 686 the community was taken over by Ceolfrid, and Wearmouth–Jarrow became a major centre of learning and knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England with a library of around 300 volumes.

The Codex Amiatinus, described by White as the 'finest book in the world', was created at the monastery and was likely worked on by Bede, who was born at Wearmouth in 673. This is one of the oldest monasteries still standing in England. While at the monastery, Bede completed the ''Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum'' ''(The Ecclesiastical History of the English People)'' in 731, a feat which earned him the title ''The father of English history''.

In the late 8th century the Vikings raided the coast, and by the middle of the 9th century the monastery had been abandoned. Lands on the south side of the river were granted to the Bishop of Durham by Athelstan of England in 930; these became known as Bishopwearmouth and included settlements such as Ryhope which fall within the modern boundary of Sunderland.

In 1100, Bishopwearmouth parish included a fishing village at the southern mouth of the river (now the East End) known as 'Soender-land' (which evolved into 'Sunderland'). This settlement was granted a charter in 1179 by Hugh Pudsey, then the Bishop of Durham (who had quasi-monarchical power within the County Palatine); the charter gave its merchants the same rights as those of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but it nevertheless took time for Sunderland to develop as a port. Fishing was the main commercial activity at the time: mainly herring in the 13th century, then salmon in the 14th and 15th centuries. From 1346 ships were being built at Wearmouth, by a merchant named Thomas Menville, and by 1396 a small amount of coal was being exported.

Jamies and Black Cats

Rapid growth of the port was prompted by the salt trade. Salt exports from Sunderland are recorded from as early as the 13th century, by 1589 salt pans were laid at Bishopwearmouth Panns (the modern-day name of the area the pans occupied is Pann's Bank, on the river bank between the city centre and the East End). Large vats of seawater were heated using coal; as the water evaporated, the salt remained. As coal was required to heat the salt pans, a coal mining community began to emerge. Only poor-quality coal was used in salt panning; better-quality coal was traded via the port, which subsequently began to grow.

Both salt and coal continued to be exported through the 17th century, with the coal trade growing significantly (2–3,000 tons of coal were exported from Sunderland in the year 1600; by 1680 this had increased to 180,000 tons). Difficulty for colliers trying to navigate the Wear’s shallow waters meant coal mined further inland was loaded onto keels (large, flat-bottomed boats) and taken downriver to the waiting colliers. A close-knit group of workers manned the Keels as 'keelmen'. In 1634 a market and yearly fair charter was granted by Bishop Thomas Morton, incorporated the settlement as a town.

Before the civil war and with the exclusion of Kingston upon Hull, the North declared for the King. In 1644 the North was captured by the Roundheads (Parliamentarians), the area itself taken in March of that year. One artifact of the civil war in the area was the long trench; a tactic of later warfare. In the village of Offerton roughly three miles inland from the present city centre, skirmishes occurred. The Roundheads blockaded the River Tyne, crippling the Newcastle coal trade, which allowed a short period of flourishing coal trade on the Wear.

In 1669, after the Restoration, King Charles II granted letters patent to one Edward Andrew, Esq. to 'build a pier and erect a lighthouse or lighthouses and cleanse the harbour of Sunderland'. They was a tonnage duty levy on shipping in order to raise the necessary funds. They was a growing number of shipbuilders or boatbuilders active on the River Wear in the late 17th century.

By the start of the 18th century the banks of the Wear were described as being studded with small shipyards, as far as the tide flowed. After 1717, measures having been taken to increase the depth of the river, Sunderland's shipbuilding trade grew substantially (in parallel with its coal exports). A number of warships were built, alongside many commercial sailing ships. By the middle of the century the town was probably the premier shipbuilding centre in Britain. By 1788 Sunderland was Britain's fourth largest port (by measure of tonnage) after London, Newcastle and Liverpool; among these it was the leading coal exporter (though it did not rival Newcastle in terms of home coal trade). Still further growth was driven across the region, towards the end of the century, by London's insatiable demand for coal during the French Revolutionary Wars.

In 1719, the parish of Sunderland was carved from the densely populated east end of Bishopwearmouth by the establishment of a new parish church, Holy Trinity Church, Sunderland (today also known as Sunderland Old Parish Church). Later, in 1769, St John's Church was built as a chapel of ease within Holy Trinity parish; built by a local coal fitter, John Thornhill, it stood in Prospect Row to the north-east of the parish church. (St John's was demolished in 1972.) By 1720 the port area was completely built up, with large houses and gardens facing the Town Moor and the sea, and labourers' dwellings vying with manufactories alongside the river. The three original settlements of Wearmouth (Bishopwearmouth, Monkwearmouth and Sunderland) had started to combine, driven by the success of the port of Sunderland, salt panning and shipbuilding along the banks of the river. Around this time, Sunderland was known as 'Sunderland-near-the-Sea'.

Sunderland's third-biggest export, after coal and salt, was glass. The town's first modern glassworks were established in the 1690s and the industry grew through the 17th century. Its flourishing was aided by trading ships bringing good-quality sand (as ballast) from the Baltic and elsewhere which, together with locally available limestone (and coal to fire the furnaces) was a key ingredient in the glassmaking process. Other industries that developed alongside the river included lime burning and pottery making (the town's first commercial pottery manufactory, the Garrison Pottery, had opened in old Sunderland in 1750).

By 1770 Sunderland had spread westwards along its High Street to join up with Bishopwearmouth. In 1796 Bishopwearmouth in turn gained a physical link with Monkwearmouth following the construction of a bridge, the Wearmouth Bridge, which was the world's second iron bridge (after the famous span at Ironbridge). It was built at the instigation of Rowland Burdon, the Member of Parliament (MP) for County Durham, and described by Nikolaus Pevsner as being 'a triumph of the new metallurgy and engineering ingenuity ..of superb elegance'. Spanning the river in a single sweep of , it was over twice the length of the earlier bridge at Ironbridge but only three-quarters the weight. At the time of building, it was the biggest single-span bridge in the world; and because Sunderland had developed on a plateau above the river, it never suffered from the problem of interrupting the passage of high-masted vessels.

During the War of Jenkins' Ear a pair of gun batteries were built (in 1742 and 1745) on the shoreline to the south of the South Pier, to defend the river from attack (a further battery was built on the cliff top in Roker, ten years later). One of the pair was washed away by the sea in 1780, but the other was expanded during the French Revolutionary Wars and became known as the Black Cat Battery. In 1794 Sunderland Barracks were built, behind the battery, close to what was then the tip of the headland.

The world's first steam dredger was built in Sunderland in 1796-7 and put to work on the river the following year. Designed by Stout's successor as Engineer, Jonathan Pickernell jr (in post from 1795 to 1804), it consisted of a set of 'bag and spoon' dredgers driven by a tailor-made 4-horsepower Boulton & Watt beam engine. It was designed to dredge to a maximum depth of below the waterline and remained in operation until 1804, when its constituent parts were sold as separate lots. Onshore, numerous small industries supported the business of the burgeoning port. In 1797 the world's first patent ropery (producing machine-made rope, rather than using a ropewalk) was built in Sunderland, using a steam-powered hemp-spinning machine which had been devised by a local schoolmaster, Richard Fothergill, in 1793; the ropery building still stands, in the Deptford area of the city.

"The greatest shipbuilding port in the world"

Sunderland's shipbuilding industry continued to grow through most of the 19th century, becoming the town's dominant industry and a defining part of its identity. By 1815 it was 'the leading shipbuilding port for wooden trading vessels' with 600 ships constructed that year across 31 different yards. By 1840 the town had 76 shipyards and between 1820 and 1850 the number of ships being built on the Wear increased fivefold. From 1846 to 1854 almost a third of the UK's ships were built in Sunderland, and in 1850 the ''Sunderland Herald'' proclaimed the town to be the greatest shipbuilding port in the world.

The Durham & Sunderland Railway Co. built a railway line across the Town Moor and established a passenger terminus there in 1836. In 1847 the line was bought by George Hudson's York and Newcastle Railway. Hudson, nicknamed 'The Railway King', was Member of Parliament for Sunderland and was already involved in a scheme to build a dock in the area. In 1846 he had formed the Sunderland Dock Company, which received parliamentary approval for the construction of a dock between the South Pier and Hendon Bay.

Increasing industrialisation had prompted residents an expansion away from the old port area in the suburban terraces of the Fawcett Estate and Mowbray Park. The area around Fawcett Street itself increasingly functioned as the civic and commercial town centre.

Marine engineering works were established from the 1820s onwards, initially providing engines for paddle steamers; in 1845 a ship named ''Experiment'' was the first of many to be converted to steam screw propulsion. Demand for steam-powered vessels increased during the Crimean War; nonetheless, sailing ships continued to be built, including fast fully-rigged composite-built clippers, including the ''City of Adelaide'' in 1864 and ''Torrens'' (the last such vessel ever built), in 1875.

By the middle of the century glassmaking was at its height on Wearside. James Hartley & Co., established in Sunderland in 1836, grew to be the largest glassworks in the country and (having patented an innovative production technique for rolled plate glass) produced much of the glass used in the construction of the Crystal Palace in 1851. A third of all UK-manufactured plate glass was produced at Hartley's by this time. Other manufacturers included the Cornhill Flint Glassworks (established at Southwick in 1865), which went on to specialise in pressed glass