Richard Callaghan is part of the Sunderland City of Culture team, as well as part of the team at the MAC Trust. Richard is a graduate of Glasgow, Birmingham and Northumbria universities, and has authored and co-authored over thirty books, mostly about history. He lives in Durham with his wife and daughter, and is a lifelong supporter of Sunderland AFC.
I want to talk to you about home, mine and yours. I am from Durham. It is where I was born, where I have lived for most of my thirty years, where my daughter was born. I feel about Durham just as many of you feel about Sunderland. It is my place, it is part of me. Were I from anywhere else, I would not be who I am. Unlike many of the people who have previously written in these pages, Sunderland is not my home. I am possessed by no duty to the city, no obligation born out of an accident of my birth. Sunderland isn’t part of me, isn’t part of my identity as Durham is. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, I like Sunderland.
Our relationship with home is never straightforward. With hometowns, as with so much else, all too often familiarity can breed contempt. We can be fiercely protective, intensely proud, yet we are often the first to find fault or criticise, to pick at the scabs of the places we love because we care about them and we want them to be better than they are. Throughout this campaign I have met dozens, hundreds of people who live and work in Sunderland, across arts organisations and community groups, in public and private sectors. Not once, not once, have I met someone who is not passionate about their city.
Too often that passion has become expressed as sadness, as anger, as rage at the way that things are and the way that things are going. That rage, that sadness, is real. It has meaning. My point is not to try to claim that such anger is unfounded, or unreasonable. My point is that it’s impossible to get angry if something doesn’t matter to you. People only get angry because they care.
It’s something you find across the region. It’s a feeling people from Newcastle have about Newcastle, and people from Middlesbrough have about Middlesbrough. But it’s more than that. It’s the way so many of us feel about the North East as a whole. On the margins geographically, politically, economically. Too often a provincial afterthought for Westminster. Taken for granted. Neglected. Forgotten.
Sometimes it’s hard not to despair. Sometimes the urge to give up becomes almost overwhelming, and it seems like it would be so much easier if we just accepted that change is impossible, that things will never get any better. I know there are times you feel like that, because there are times that I feel like that too. And then I remember that rage, that sadness. That passion. I remember that passion and it gives me hope.
Because where there is passion, there is power. It is a power that comes from the knowledge that there is something that unites people from Sunderland with people from Durham and people from Newcastle and people from Hartlepool and South Shields and Gateshead and Middlesbrough. That, beyond all the bickering and the squabbling, when it comes right down to it we share a common history, common bonds, a common home.
I want Sunderland to win UK City of Culture for Sunderland, certainly. But I want Sunderland to win for Durham too, for Middlesbrough, for Darlington and Hartlepool, and yes, even for Newcastle and Gateshead. Because whatever our differences, they pale in comparison to those things that unite us. Because changing Sunderland will change everywhere else along with it.
Making Sunderland stronger will make Durham stronger, make Newcastle and Gateshead stronger, make Middlesbrough and Hartlepool and Darlington stronger. The more there is going on in the North East, the more jobs there are, the more vibrant and exciting things there are happening, the more that passion will be expressed not as sadness and rage but as joy and pride. The more Sunderland becomes a place that young people want to stay, or talent wants to come, the more it becomes a place that businesses want to invest or people want to study, the more the whole North East becomes a place that people want to live their lives, to raise their families, to make their home.
We are not competitors. We are not rivals. Act as such, expend our energy bickering over the scraps from Whitehall’s table, and the North East will never progress. Divided we will always fall. That’s why City of Culture is important to me. Not for itself, but for its part in something bigger. Because Sunderland is the North East’s second city. Because it’s been punching way below its weight for too long now. Because it’s time to get it off the bench and into the game. I don’t for one second believe that winning City of Culture will do that by itself. But I know it will help. I am sure of it.
– Richard Callaghan, Research Associate at Sunderland 2021
