When the dean of Durham inspected Sunderland in 1751, he dismissed it as ‘a large filthy town inhabited by more filthy people’ (p. 94). The River Wear, with Sunderland at its mouth, has too often been unfairly overlooked as a poor relation to the Tyne, but this meticulously researched volume should help to bring the town back to the attention of urban historians. Durham's Victoria County History (VCH) has a long history of its own: the county attracted three volumes in the early twentieth century edited by William Page, and a rejuvenated society under the editorial direction of Gillian Cookson is focusing on County Durham's towns, having begun with Darlington in 2005. Sunderland has already attracted two shorter books under the auspices of the Durham VCH, published in 2007 and 2010, and these might suit casual and introductory readers better than the full-blown volume. As we would expect from a VCH volume, the scholarly apparatus here is substantial and authoritative, and the tone empirical rather than argumentative, but it is also readable and well written. The narrative is artfully constructed, weaving together separate administrative, religious, economic and social sections in a manner that is never forced or unnatural and only rarely repetitive.

The first half of the volume is devoted to a detailed chronological overview of Sunderland's episodic history. Home to a venerable Anglo-Saxon monastery, it was not ‘urban’ by any normal definition of size or function for many of the thousand years or so covered here. A twelfth-century bishop of Durham optimistically granted Wearmouth a borough charter (alongside Durham City, Gateshead and others) in an attempt to encourage competition with the free borough of Newcastle upon Tyne, but for 400 years, early Sunderland remained little more than a collection of isolated villages around the mouth of the River Wear. Then, from the mid-seventeenth century, Sunderland's making as an industrial town was swift. It had a population of about 3,300 in 1666, which rose to 18,000 by 1762 (p. 7). This development is striking in the face of apparent disadvantages: a small hinterland overshadowed by Newcastle, a poor land transport network and ineffective government. But the prize of immeasurably rich Durham coal seams justified investment in the harbour, particularly after the foundation of the River Wear Commission in 1718. ‘Black gold’, say the authors, ‘stained the town in more ways than one’ (p. 95), and related industries including glassmaking and salt-panning began to emerge. Rising population put parish authorities (there was no municipal government until the mid-nineteenth century) under considerable pressure to relieve poverty and to clear up sewage. Prosperity was fragile: despite the growth of some ancillary industries, the intense specialization in coal left Sunderland vulnerable to demand shocks and price falls. Then, the building of Wearmouth Bridge in 1796 marked the beginning of a new phase in Sunderland's history. It united settlements on the north and south banks of the Wear and was followed by an intensive period of house razing and rebuilding, changing the character of the town considerably. The population had doubled again by 1831, and again to more than 60,000 by 1851 (p. 7). Growth in trade accelerated further, and heavy industry took on a new prominence and shaped the landscape of the riverside with factories and giant shipyards. By the early twentieth century, Sunderland's shipbuilding was world-renowned, but the inter-war depression, and foreign competition, sent it into a gradual decline, which had devastating social impact by the 1970s.

The volume's chronology takes the reader right up to 2008 (a welcome departure from the early Durham VCH volumes that ended in 1836), and another phase of Sunderland's history included new success in car manufacture, the University and the National Glass Centre, opened in 1998. This more diverse economic and social picture is reinforced in the volume's second part, which offers valuable histories of ‘institutions’, from churches and major public buildings and parks, via the police, fire and healthcare, to schools, libraries, newspapers, cinemas and so on, as well as a useful essay on ‘trade, industry and communications’. These institutional biographies, alongside the accessible narrative offered in the first part of the volume, will provide a very useful reference and a starting point for comparative work as well as regional historians. It contains 81 figures, including a number of useful maps and wonderful historical photographs. The image of tens of striking miners sitting on a roof top looking down at the bailiffs and police who had come to evict them from their tied housing in 1892 is a powerful one (p. 137). The volume reveals a town with a rich industrial, commercial and cultural history and it should encourage historians to reconsider Sunderland's urban past.