Sunderland, City 5 of 69 in the UK Cityscapes Project (Postcards from the city)

So far I have photographed the cities of Newcastle, Liverpool, Carlisle and Durham and today was the turn of sunny Sunderland.

Sunderland is a fairly new city, it was granted city status in 1992 and has a population of over 275,000 people, it has it's own football team, a museum, the winter gardens which are in the city centre in Mowbray Park.  What it doesn't have is a cathedral or a castle but it was home to Terry Deary, author of the Horrible History books.

It was a gloomy day when I arrived in Sunderland, being from Newcastle I only had to hop onto the Metro, a snappy £4.50 got me a day return and a 25 minute journey brought me right into the city centre.

So onto my photographic journey....

clearly Sunderland is growing, evolving and transforming every day and when I was there today it did seem like it was partially still being built.

In all of the times I've visited Sunderland over the years I'd never really realised just how close it is to the sea, the city centre is actually within walking distance which must be lovely if you live in the city but want to escape to the seaside on sunny hot afternoons (we usually have at least 2 of them throughout the year in the UK)

some of the views were not quite so inspiring as others but it's all part of the rich landscape which makes up our great cities.

The Winter Gardens in Mowbray park are definitely worth a visit if you have kids plus the fact that it's positively tropical in there make it a great option for chilly british spring days when the weather isn't so great.

I don't know how many cities have parks pretty much right in the city centre, I'm sure I'm about to find that out though, I did find this lovely view in the park though with the bandstand looking so pretty underneath a cascading waterfall of cherry blossom

I climbed up a hill in Mowbray park called Building Hill which is a pretty weird name for a hill, sadly most of the views towards the city centre were shrouded by trees.  I'm actually as you can imagine doing a lot of climbing on this great adventure so it's quite handy that I'm using the Fuji X-Pro1, the lightest professional camera I've ever owned, I can't imagine doing this with all of my old kit which weighed an absolute ton.

So that was Sunderland, City 5 of 69 in the UK Cityscapes Project, City 6 is going to happen sometime next week and if you're a local business who would like to talk to me about exclusively sponsoring your city and have your business featured on the blog, social media and in the eventual book please get in touch by emailing mandy@mandycharltonphotography.com

If you would like to find out more about the UK Cityscapes project you can find out all you need to know on my Crowd funding page and please keep helping, I can't do this without you!