How inner-city living can transform the city by the sea

Sunderland is the city by the sea but despite its picturesque coast, only 3,000 people call the city centre home. That’s a mere 1% of Sunderland's 300,000-strong population.

Compare that to Newcastle, ten miles away, where around 15,000 people live in the city centre.

Peter McIntyre, Sunderland council's executive director of economy and place, doesn't dress it up. The city, he says, has been on "a 30-year mission to hollow itself out.”

Empty streets and quiet bars have defined the centre for a generation, while the people who might fill them with life have been pushed out to the suburbs.

The result is a city centre that's a shadow of its former glory.

There is a fix and it isn't complicated: build more homes in the centre, and the centre will start to revive on its own.

Manchester is the clearest case study in Britain where this has worked. In 1991, barely 11,300 people lived within a mile of Piccadilly Gardens. A deliberate policy shift, the Central Manchester Development Corporation started converting old warehouses into flats around Castlefield in 1988, that changed the city centre’s trajectory completely.

Today, close to 85,000 people live in the same area. Roughly 29,500 homes have been built in the last decade, and the population is still climbing.

The housing dragged an entire economy back to life. Central Manchester became a magnet for tech firms, built a genuine night-time and cultural economy and now pulls in billions in tourism revenue every year.

This is far from a one-off success story, it’s a repeatable model, one Sunderland could and seems to be following.

The city's own Riverside Sunderland Masterplan includes 1,000 new homes for a community of 2,500 people, alongside a million square feet of offices and workspace supporting 8,000 to 10,000 quality jobs.

The logic underpinning all of this is simple: residents create demand that visitors and office workers never can.

A city centre that people live in has a built-in customer base, seven days a week, rather than a population that visits, spends and leaves.

That demand feeds a genuine circular economy, shorter supply chains, more people walking or cycling instead of driving, better prospects for independent shops and markets over out-of-town chains, and smarter use of the buildings that already exist rather than paving over greenfield sites.

The benefits wouldn't stop at Sunderland's boundary, either. The North East's transport links tie its major urban centres together and a bigger, busier Sunderland city centre would spill outward, drawing more visitors and spending into the wider region and lifting the North East's economy as a whole.

Sunderland doesn't need a new idea. It needs to continue down the path laid by the previous council administration, one that's already led to success across the country.

The blueprint exists. All that is needed is the will to build it.