Inside Sunderland's Brand-New Culture House
Sunderland's highly-anticipated new multi-purpose cultural venue opens this September
Culture House Sunderland: The National Centre for Creative Smart Cities will be home to the City Library and packed with interactive, digital features and a year-round programme of fun. As a reimagined library and creative hub, it will bring together culture, creativity, technology and the community, in the hope of inspiring innovation, supporting future skills, and strengthening the creative economy whilst ensuring that everyone has an opportunity to participate in Sunderland's future.
‘It’s more than a building,’ explains director Leanne Littlewood. ‘What we're trying to build is a creative ecosystem that people can connect with and bring their ideas, so that opportunities can be brought to life within that collaboration.’
Culture means different things to different people, but Leanne assures us there’s something for everyone inside Culture House. ‘My generation are all about experiences – something that can be photographed and having a really authentic connection. My mum and dad are all about music, my brother likes sport and my other brother likes wrestling. All of those different elements of culture are really different and really personal, and I think that’s what Culture House is about,’ she says. ‘Rather than ask people to choose between the different definitions of culture, it recognises that culture can be books or virtual reality, traditional storytelling or digital storytelling, or it can be heritage and innovation. It's something that inspires people, connects them, and brings them joy, and I think that any city that is as future- and forward-thinking as Sunderland is, needs somewhere like Culture House to be able to cultivate that feeling.’
Making everyone feel at home, The Atrium is being described as the ‘living room’ of the city. ‘That’s where you can come and sit down and engage with the activity that's happening around you – that might be something on our digital screens, a pop-up performance that's happening, it could be absolutely anything, or you could just have a sit down and a chat with someone,’ says Leanne. ‘It’s that idea of Culture House being the city's home, and we've passed that through the building. We have several different spaces that you might identify as being in a home. I call it the front room, other people call it a lounge, but really it's those spaces where people can talk, catch up, connect and gossip, because that's what happens in your home.’
That feeling is continued throughout the building through a variety of spaces. ‘At the back of the building we have two exhibition spaces,’ says Leanne. ‘One is a much more traditional exhibition space, the Focus Gallery, and the Vision Gallery is next door to that, and that's where something a little bit different will happen. You’ll be able to see into the Vision Gallery from High Street West when you walk past, so the things that are happening in there are always going to be visible from outside, and they'll always be a bit different. We also have a retail space on the ground floor. Our gift shop will be packed full of work from various artists from across the region, and Blacks Corner, who are our café provider, are going to be on the ground floor as well.’
On the first floor, The Den is a children's play space that's surrounded by games, books, a crafting space and space for families to hang out while the kids are reading and discovering the library. ‘We also have a 360-degree Immersion Gallery on that floor, and lots of computers with loads of different creative packages on them, a podcasting space, a media studio and lots of space for young people to be able to come and engage and create,’ Leanne adds. ‘Then you go up to the next floor and it's a little bit more grown up. That’s where the main library collection is. There’s more creative computers there, another podcasting space, more classrooms, and it’s also where the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art is.’
The third floor is even more of a mixed bag. ‘There’s the Sky Garden and our Inventors Lab where you can do things like 3D print and laser cut,’ says Leanne. ‘We have the City Eye where you'll be told stories of lots of interesting things that are happening around the city, and there’s also an exhibition space within that. We’ll be showcasing an organisation called the Little Inventors who are celebrating their 10th anniversary this year with us, and they've got an exhibition that responds to the idea of making the city more joyful. There's going to be 10 really quirky inventions that are on display within the City Eye. There's a great big co-working space on the top floor where you can come and log onto our internet. Bring your own device and you can work from here. Our event space is on the top floor as well, so there's all sorts of different things that are happening in there.’
Culture House’s opening exhibition, Our Home in Space, will be a collaboration with London venue The Barbican, bringing together artworks from around the world, from the deep ocean to outer space. Then the venue will host talks, creative workshops for young people and adults, family events, screenings and performances. ‘These are lots of different ways of being able to tell stories because ultimately that's what Culture House is,’ explains Leanne, ‘it’s a library and we tell stories.’
Leanne has enjoyed turning the vision into a reality. ‘I did lots of presentations using CGIs to lots of people, and one of the things that always resonated with everyone was the CGI of The Atrium – the giant staircase that's like a helter skelter and the beautiful screens,’ she says. ‘There was one group with quite a lot of little ones in it and they instantly said “we're going to have fish” because the digital screens looked as if it was an aquarium. I think what was important to me, off the back of that, that we were able to give them that experience and that we were able to provide what they'd envisaged and imagined because of the CGIs. I've always gone back to that first set of programming, making sure that we're responding faithfully to the imagery that we provided at the outset.’
Leanne and the team can’t wait to see visitors react to the new cultural hub when they walk through the doors for the first time. ‘Success for me is hearing somebody say “I didn't think this place was going to be for me, but now I've seen it, I can understand why it's important and how I'm going to engage with it”. Success is that young person discovering something new, and finding a new talent, having access to something that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to have at home or at school,’ Leanne suggests. ‘It’s finding out that a co-working session has led to a new business being created or someone starting a new opportunity together by collaborating on something. It's a resident finding confidence, connection or inspiration by coming along to one of our sessions. Visitor numbers matter, and economic impact matters, but the real success of the building for me will be around the lives that we change, the increased opportunity that we provide, and the stronger communities that come off the back of the building being in place.’
