Central Police Station, High Street West

A competition was held for designing the courts, police station and fire station. The challenge was to design and construct these buildings within an unusual shaped island of land bordered by Dun Cow Street and the High Street to the south and Gilbridge Avenue to the north west. The winners were Sunderland architects William Milburn (1850-1935) and Thomas Ridley Milburn (1862-1943). The magistrates’ court incorporating the former police station, employed a style of Edwardian Baroque with impressively stern architectural features that were in keeping with its serious judicial role. This is particularly noticeable in the building’s clock tower, a lantern tower that is square in form, quite different from the rounded copper domes of the Empire and the neighbouring pubs. The old court building (HER 4802) remains one of Sunderland’s most prominent buildings, though its police office was superseded by a modern police station on the neighbouring site. This modern police station, of brutal concrete design, dates from 1972.