Auditorium is a huge step in the right direction for our city
This week we reported on the end of an era, with the relocation of Luciano’s Ristorante on the cards. They intend to move to the nearby new hotel. This is good news.
It’s a fine restaurant in what is a perfectly pleasant building. Inside. It’s the outside that fails to captivate.
Not all buildings are too beautiful to kill and the place in question is hardly Mackie’s Corner. Good riddance. It was also previously home to an unforgivably awful bar called Idols.
If you remember it, we’re sorry for reminding you.
Some to cling to the fallacy that anything that we had a long time ago was by definition wonderful. Similarly bewildering is the notion that the long demolished adjacent pub/bearpit The Old Twenty-Nine was a “great place”.
The Idols building is mercifully about to meet the same fate. That neck of the woods is now looking better than anyone remembers – and about to become better still.
The imminent re-birth of Luciano’s in Keel Square follows the opening of the impressive new Fire Station Auditorium, which seems likely to become a financial as well as cultural asset to Sunderland.
The Keel Square and Cultural Quarter area also has some fine places to eat and drink; plus Minster Park. Who knows? It might even help to keep the Uncle Toms out of other cities.
The whole development in that corner of Sunderland isn’t merely in the pipeline; most of it has already happened.
Nevertheless, to use a beautifully pithy Wearside phrase, there is always a contingent who will twist on 21; concentrating on the negative and sneering at the positive. So be it. Such people tend not to be among life’s achievers.
None of this is to claim, by any stretch of the imagination, that Utopia is upon us. A stroll down Holmeside or Blandford Street still somehow manages to depress.
We’re also aware that the Cultural Quarter is only one part of the city centre; which is itself only one part of Sunderland.
There’s an awfully long way to go.
But right now, let’s afford ourselves a little cheer for the Auditorium and all around it.