Back in the Premier League — After 3,009 Days
Sunderland regeneration and Premier League return is finally a reality — 3,009 days since their last top-flight game.
Travel far enough and you’ll find Sunderland fans in bars from Málaga to Malaysia. Not because the club is a global powerhouse like Real Madrid, but because Wearside was a place people left. If you were young and ambitious, you went — to university, a trade, or the armed forces — and you rarely came back. East Durham, where I grew up, was the same.
For Sunderland fans abroad, watching games with a small knot of fellow exiles is part of the identity. The Sunderland regeneration and Premier League return means something different to them — a reminder that home might finally be on the up.
Culture, Food, and a Changing City
Just a month ago, the BBC broadcast a Proms concert from Sunderland for the first time. The Old Fire Station and the Empire Theatre now anchor a new cultural quarter.
The first graduates from Sunderland’s medical school are becoming Senior House Officers, while the year below them are just getting their white coats and stethoscopes — meaning the day when a Sunderland patient can see a Sunderland-trained GP and surgeon in a Sunderland hospital is finally in sight.
A Michelin-starred chef runs the Stadium of Light’s restaurant. A Hairy Biker has a gourmet pie shop in the trendy Sheepfolds development.
The promised film studio on the Wear may take longer to appear, but housing, retail, and leisure projects are rising all over the city centre. Even a new footbridge — controversially renamed by the council after the public voted for “Regis Le Bridge” — has been built. David Squires even gave Le Bris his own hapless Star Trek-style cartoon in The Guardian.
So much is going up that the council and the football club are squabbling over whose developments get priority.
The Demographic Shift Behind Sunderland’s Revival
When the shipyards closed, Sunderland haemorrhaged people. The young, skilled, and ambitious left. Those who stayed were older, sicker, and more likely to be unemployed. The ratio of workers to non-workers collapsed.
When the welfare state began, there were three workers for every non-worker, many of them stay-at-home parents who drew little from the system. Now, there are only three workers for every two non-workers — and those not in work cost far more to support. That gap is why we borrow so much to fund the welfare state.
In Sunderland, the imbalance was worse. The city simply didn’t generate enough income to support itself, relying on money from London and the South East. Over decades, that dependency ate away at civic pride.
At the last census, the city was still shrinking — but more slowly. Since then, GP registration data shows something remarkable: people are moving to Sunderland again. For the first time in decades, the city is growing. The worker-to-non-worker ratio is improving. Sunderland is edging towards economic self-reliance. People are coming to Sunderland to work.
The Sunderland regeneration and Premier League return have both become symbols of a city that’s learning to stand on its own two feet again.
How Did the Sunderland Regeneration and Premier League Return Happen?
There was no single “silver bullet.”
- Local government — Despite years of chaos, the council quietly developed strong planning and development frameworks. When Boris Johnson’s government announced Levelling Up funding, Sunderland was ready and secured significant investment.
- Developers and business — Private investment flowed in, supercharged by government money.
- Civic and cultural leadership — Local groups backed projects like the Fire Station and helped win City of Music status.
- The university’s ambition — Sunderland’s medical school was a bold gamble. I doubted they could pull it off, but they did — with help from NHS leaders and academics across the North East.
- And yes, a Swiss billionaire with Harry Potter charm played a part too.
This is regeneration’s real lesson: it’s messy, complicated, and built by dozens of partners — local, national, public, private — pulling in the same direction. No single strongman, just a lot of determined people.
The Anger Beneath the Surface
Yet not everyone is celebrating the Sunderland’s regeneration. Online, anger over new developments is loud and venomous. Announcements about new housing or riverside projects are met with abuse.
Why? In part because not everyone moving to Sunderland is white — or British. For the city to thrive, it needs more young people to work, study, and grow the economy. But for some, diversity is an existential threat. They would rather see the economy stagnate than share their city with newcomers.
Some dream not of a confident, prosperous Sunderland, but of the Crowtree Leisure Centre’s wave machine and a monochrome city centre. Their comments verge on — and sometimes openly embrace — the language of ethnic cleansing.
Two Cities, Side by Side
China Miéville’s novel The City & The City imagines two communities occupying the same streets, refusing to acknowledge each other’s existence. It’s a metaphor for apartheid or frozen conflicts.
But Sunderland now feels like that. One city is on the way up — new shops, houses, restaurants, gigs, and a Premier League football team. The other is trapped online, nursing grievances, longing for a past that isn’t coming back.
The future of Sunderland regeneration and Premier League return depends on which of the city’s two sides shapes the years ahead.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79qgz3lyyjo
A 3-0 win over West Ham (which have “hammered” Sunderland way too many times in history) is certainly a great start to Sunderland AFC’s season! It’s also good to hear that the city itself is on the up again, even if I’m sceptical about a retail revival given the impact of online shopping (and particularly the ultra-cheap direct-from-China sites like Shein and Temu)!
But surely the problem when it comes to the rise of Reform in the North East is not somewhere like Sunderland (which after all is a fair-sized city that voted Labour even in 2019, even if it is somewhat overshadowed by Tyneside) but rather with the villages and small towns that don’t have the critical mass to support 21st-century economic activity. My mother (who I don’t regard as a bigot) didn’t vote in this year’s local elections due to lack (at the time) of appropriate photo ID, but she said she would have voted Reform if she had, saying “what did Labour ever do for us in the pit villages?”
Incidentally, which platform were those disgusting racist comments posted on by the way: Facebook, Nextdoor, or something else I haven’t heard of? I also wonder if some of them were posted by non-local agitators: racists from other parts of Britain or even Russian bots.
And about the “shop after shop is foreign”, isn’t that just a case of big businesses (with their economies of scale) outcompeting small ones in serving the majority culture, so that the best opportunities for small businesses to survive is by serving the niche tastes of ethnic and/or subcultural minorities?
(Southern Europe is much more dominated by small family businesses than northern Europe, largely because poor enforcement of taxation means that such businesses can easily dodge tax, but can’t expand because they’d have to hire non-family employees who could rat them out to the taxman. I wonder if some of these posters would prefer such a society, even if it would make the country poorer overall just as it does the countries of southern Europe.)
In lots of the North East a huge proportion of small businesses are owned by immigrants, corner shops, takeaways, etc. My great-grandad had a small shop and sub-post office, and the English, famously, were a nation of shopkeepers, but we seem to have lost our enthusiasm for small businesses like that. Or maybe it is just that those with entrepreneurial spirit leave town for somewhere better.
The comments all come from Facebook. There are lots of North East “have your say” FB groups which have become overwhelmed by far right content. They are one of the main campaign tools for Reform, allowing Farage to stop short of outright demands for ethnic cleansing, while this followers on-line say that bit out loud.
Clearly some of the worst accounts are bots, and some of the most prolific FB pages for far right content are based outside the UK. But most of these are real people who want a whiter Britain
The “nation of shopkeepers” quote came from an era (it’s often attributed to Napoleon) when the big-vs-small dichotomy in retail didn’t exist yet: it would be about a century before the first department stores and supermarkets came into existence.
I was presuming (not being a racist myself of course) the “shop after shop is foreign” point referred to the merchandise being stuff that mostly immigrants would want to buy, rather than merely to the ownership.
When exactly did racist content become so all-pervasive in the Facebook groups you’re thinking of? I deleted my Facebook account the weekend after Trump won re-election in the US, and I hadn’t used it much for years at that point anyway.
What are your thoughts on the article in yesterday’s Sun about the rise of Reform in Sunderland?
How Sunderland went from ‘very big union city’ to Reform target where Labour ‘are hated in the working men’s clubs’
(Other than my first thought that “working men’s clubs” these days are likely to have more pensioners than actual workers these days, which the article itself is alluding to at the end, when it quotes a retired supermarket worker saying “Labour will lose in Sunderland on pensioners’ votes alone.”)
I have a deep dive into Reform in Sunderland next weekend!
Does that mean the coming weekend (May 2-3) or the following weekend after the local elections (May 9-10)?