A A History of the County of Durham: Volume V: Sunderland (Victoria County History) - Hardcover

A capable survey of Sunderland's history over a long timespan, supported by an impressive research effort. LANDSCAPE HISTORY

I would wholeheartedly recommend this volume to anybody interested in the rise and decline of industrial NE England. THE SOCIETY FOR MEDIEVAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The present volume with its scrupulous referencing offers scope for future researchers to look into many other aspects of the city's life rather than simply rehashing a familiar tale of rise and decline. THE LOCAL HISTORIAN

Famed across Europe during Bede's time and the heyday of Wearmouth monastery, Sunderland found a less celebrated renown in the twentieth century with the distress of its heavy industries between the wars, and their final extinction in the 1980s. Between those very contrasting eras, its story is one of re-invention and of a growing industrial and commercial might. The coal trade transformed the town during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; shipbuilding came to the fore in the nineteenth, and Wearside became the nation's, and the world's, greatest shipbuilder. Though it lacked formal local government before 1835, this was a wealthy and relatively sophisticated town, with a great and spectacular early iron bridge (1796).
This volume covers the history of Sunderland from the earliest times and into the twenty-first century, including its landscape and buildings, government, trade and industry, politics and social institutions.