W hen Richard Marsden looks across the Wear gorge to the centre of Sunderland , he has never seen so many cranes. His design and build firm, BDN, is rushing to renovate an old stable block in the shadow of the city’s football stadium. “Now there’s a bit of a resurgence, I want to be part of that,” he says of Sunderland, as joiners and carpenters fit out bars and a microbrewery ready for the new season.
The 140-year-old building was once the stables for horses used to take coal to the railway from the mines directly beneath what is now Sunderland’s Stadium of Light . For years the stables stood derelict, roofless and neglected, only a few hundred metres from Sunderland’s city centre – albeit on the other side of the deep river gorge. Marsden is hoping those days are over.
His bet is not a one-off. Sunderland’s gorge-top skyline is changing rapidly as the city’s leaders try to reverse decades of hollowing out of the city centre. It is an experiment in local government intervention, and also in a form of industrial strategy that looks to cities and the UK’s dominant services economy as well as eyecatching factories as a way of reviving the sluggish economy.
View image in fullscreen Richard Marsden of BDN at Sheepfolds stables, a new leisure and eating space. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Guardian Sunderland’s leaders are hoping that the intervention can serve as an example for other parts of the country. If it succeeds, it could also be watched with interes.