A ten-year strategy to regenerate a historic neighbourhood in central Sunderland through a mix of physical development, adaptive reuse and economic and cultural development.

As well as working with Sunderland City Council on Nile + Villiers, a flagship scheme to build new sustainable housing on Sunniside’s key opportunity site, TOWN is deploying our experience in strategic-scale ‘master’ development to prepare a 10-year place strategy aligning local people and businesses, public sector resources and private and charitable investment behind a vision and investment plan to deliver sustained population growth, economic and cultural development and improved quality of life and place across Sunniside.

A significant opportunity for Sunderland City Centre.

Sunniside is a neighbourhood occupying about 20 hectares of central Sunderland, south of the River Wear and east of the core of the city centre. Its handsome, walkable Victorian streets are home to around 400 people and the city’s main concentration of SME businesses, many in the creative industries, as well as important parts of the city’s cultural and nightlife. The area also suffers from high crime rates, depopulation and many underused buildings and vacant sites. Overcoming these problems affords the potential for Sunniside to become a thriving neighbourhood contributing to the City Council’s wider plan to grow the population of Sunderland’s urban core.

Partnership for action.

TOWN, supported by Create Streets and with funding from Sunderland City Council and DLUHC’s Partnerships for People and Place programme, has developed a strategy focused on creating a sense of place and purpose, building healthy and safe streets, intensifying the use of buildings and spaces, activating vacant sites and encouraging an ethos of stewardship. Actions range from short-term enabling programmes to major capital developments of key sites and buildings – of which Nile + Villiers is an important catalyst.