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Sunderland
I could have been in LA
I didn't so much arrive in Sunderland as wake up in it. My train got in late, you see, and when I emerged from the station it was raining old ladies and sticks (as they say in Welsh), so I blew a fiver getting cabbed the three miles along the coast up to my digs, The Seaburn Inn, where I fell asleep cradling a cup of tea and watching the first episode of Dinnerladies, which I had wrongly supposed to be set hereabouts.
It wasn't until the next morning, when I drew the curtains and stepped out onto the balcony, that I got what I was looking for - an eyeful of Sunderland. I was confronted with a massive outdoor swimming pool (known as the North Sea) and a sizable stretch of sandy coastline. People were jogging, lots of them, and one couple was even rollerblading while holding hands. I could have been in LA. I confess it came as a bit of a shock. A gobsmacking beach wasn't something I associated with Sunderland. I took a deep breath - the prelude to action - and it smelt of bacon, umpteen rashers of said, their collective waft having escaped a beachside kiosk and drifted invitingly towards me.
Ah, Sunderland. Queen of Northumbria, cradle of Alice in Wonderland, former shipbuilding heavyweight . but also routinely denigrated, reflexively shunned, automatically pooh-poohed - and not only by Geordies, that well-meaning tribe who reside ten miles up the coast in a big village called Newcastle. Although by no means a perfect metric, a recent International Passenger Survey revealed that Sunderland was just about the least likely place a passenger arriving in the UK would be heading to. The only places less likely were Douglas and Ayr. In the 850-page Lonely Planet guide to England, meanwhile, Sunderland isn't mentioned at all - ouch. When I told the lady running the café on the train that I was going on holiday to Sunderland, she stopped what she was doing and asked me two things: 1) was I right in the head, and 2) would I pop into the bookies on Station Street to make sure her mother wasn't in there? I think it's fair to deduce that, at the time of my visit, Sunderland wasn't at the top of many bucket lists.
Nonetheless, up on my balcony, surveying the scene, weighing up the sea, I felt unreasonably excited. It felt good to be abroad, and unmoored, and carefree, and clueless, with nothing more pressing ahead than a stroll and a butcher's, my ordinary responsibilities hundreds of miles away, minding their own business. Item number one on my agenda: a clueless mooch.
My hotel was enwrapped by Lowry Road. This didn't take me by surprise - I knew that the painter was fond of this spot. He would come across from Lancashire, from the other side of the Pennines, for a change of scene, for a new shade of grey. Sunderland became a bit of a bolthole for L.S. Lowry; a place where he could escape the pressures of his escalating success. Lowry saw something in Sunderland, something that others didn't, something worth capturing, something worth getting down. He stayed in the same room at the same hotel on each of his visits, and according to the bloke that served him dinner each evening, Lowry never deviated from a menu of cold roast beef, chips, gravy, orange juice, sliced banana, fresh cream, and coffee. The artist clearly knew a good thing when he saw one.
To work up an appetite for such a feast, Lowry would walk south along the promenade, down to the river and the shipyards (of which there were hundreds), where he'd watch all the workers spilling out, heading for home, dashing for the tram or the bus, pulling their collars up against a crisp northeasterly and thanking their lucky stars it was that time of day again. My dad used to work in the shipyard at Portsmouth. He said that come knocking-off time, thousands of men could be seen streaming out of the shipyard's gate on bicycles. My dad didn't think anything of it - it was too normal to be interesting - but Lowry obviously did. As chance would have it, Lowry spotted a young girl sketching the workers once, as they spilled and headed, and dashed and pulled, and he made a point of saying: 'Nee lass, that's not how you do it; that's not how you do men in a hurry; give it 'ere.'
To my mind, Lowry distinguished himself as a painter by shining light where it wasn't customarily shone; by highlighting shady spots and overshadowed slices of life and showing them to be beautiful - if only in a quiet way, a humble way, an accidental way. As I stood on the promenade, facing the sea, polishing off my morning bap (or is it a cob around here?), it wasn't hard to see why Lowry held this bit of the world in such high regard. I'm not much of an aesthete, but it seemed to me that the palette was a winner: the steely sea and sky above roughly golden sand. Lowry's 1966 painting The North Sea - a large seascape that captures exactly this palette - went for a million quid not long ago. Just think how much sliced banana and cream he could've got for that. Interestingly, I'm told there's one of Lowry's paintings in the Morrisons supermarket just along from my hotel, hanging proudly, and mostly ignored, above the hot sausage rolls. There's something fitting, and lovely, and very Sunderland about that. At least I think there is.
Also lovely was the pair of chaps in front of me now, who were painting the railing that runs the length of the promenade, rolling black over green. On the face of it, one was getting paid by the hour and the other by the job. The former was being fabulously creative in finding ways not to crack on. They had one of those industrial-sized radios, the type that could survive a nuclear disaster. It was playing The Beautiful South.
Just along from the painters, a woman was walking her dog on the beach. She was on the phone and playing fetch at once - you know, getting things done, being proactive - but then somehow got her wires crossed and instead of chucking the tennis ball threw her phone. I enjoyed the woman's reaction to her mistake, which was dramatic and panicked and instinctive at first, but then muted and measured, as if trying to give the impression that she did this sort of thing all the time. Saving face, I guess. I had a good view of the balls up, for the land had climbed by this point, up to Roker Cliff Park, which offers a decent vantage point. The elevation belittled the beach, squashed the sea, conjured a new frame entirely, as contours are wont to do. It suits me fine when the lie of the land is all over the show.
The park is dominated by a lighthouse. I gleaned from an info panel that said lighthouse had recently upped sticks; that it used to be down there by the harbour, rather than up here not by the harbour. I like the idea that lighthouses can move, that their lanterns can shift, that the focus and scope of their light can alter. It bodes well for places in the dark. They call this coastal stretch the Roker Riviera, I'm told, with Roker being this part of Sunderland, and Riviera being something else entirely. It's a tongue-in-cheek appellation, but it holds up under scrutiny (just). The three-mile stretch is no one-trick pony: it's got flat stretches, rocky outcrops, sheer drops, idiosyncratic geology. The pier down at this end of things, Roker Pier, is an accidental beauty. Its graceful brick curve was, of course, a purposeful construction - to enclose, to shelter - but there's no doubt that beauty was a byproduct of its overarching intent. A beauty in the making, if you will.
The pier was finished in 1903, having been designed by Henry Hay Wake, who oversaw its construction from a nice semi-detached gaff up on the cliff. I fancy Henry headed down periodically, to say to some bricky or another, 'Nee lad, that's not how you build a pier in a hurry!' There's a little plaque outside Henry's old house, giving away his deed. I love such plaques, such small displays of public affection, such quiet calls for attention, for an engineer or a poet, or a pair of local sisters who smuggled 29 Jewish families out of Germany and Austria in the 1930s (that one's on Croft Avenue, near a pub called Chesters), though I do fancy that such plaques could be a bit more down-to-earth sometimes, remembering an Alan who stubbed his toe on this spot in an otherwise unremarkable decade, or a Shelia who had eleven children at this address, not one of them thanking her for it. If only for a giggle, you understand, to lighten the mood of those going about town, and to show that all sorts go into the making of a place. I reckon plenty of local treasure would be uncovered. Tall orders and small miracles, feats of courage and genius and kindness by everyday folk, to complement the do-gooding of the illustrious.
One thing that could be remembered hereabouts is the time the current captain of Sunderland AFC saved a labrador from drowning. I was told the story by a fella turning an old tram shelter into a café, just along from the pier. I asked him for the time initially, as a way into some chitchat, but he said he didn't know because his phone was in the van. Then I told him I was on holiday, and in thanks he told me that the Sunderland captain saved a labrador from drowning just over there, saw it struggling in the surf then stripped off and did a proper Baywatch job. Apparently the Sunderland supporters now sing about the episode when they concede a goal and have nothing else to be happy about. There's a lighthouse at the end of Henry's pier, for the record, and unlike the one up...
