Monkwearmouth Museum Of Land Transport With Walls, Footbridge, Waiting Room

Monkwearmouth Museum of Land Transport with walls, footbridge, waiting room

Railway station, now museum, on North Bridge Street, Sunderland. The main building and screen walls were constructed in 1848 as the branch terminus of the Brandling Junction Railway for the York, Newcastle and Berwick Railway Company. A footbridge was added when the line was extended in 1879, and a passenger waiting room on the west platform was added the same year. The station closed in 1981. The complex comprises a sandstone ashlar station building with Welsh slate roof, a cast-iron footbridge with stone side steps and wrought-iron handrails, and a wood and glass passenger waiting room.

The station building is Classical in style with a two-storey, three-window centre section, one-storey two-bay wings, and two windows in projecting end pavilions with quadrant end bays. A central prostyle pedimented giant Ionic tetrastyle portico fronts the building, with architraves to double panelled doors and sashes with glazing bars. A floor band runs across the front. The flanking set-back sections have scroll brackets to cornices on architraves of panelled doors in inner bays and windows in outer bays with bracketed sills. Cornice and blocking course continue from the floor band of the centre. The projecting end pavilions have similar sills and lugged architraves, with paired Tuscan pilasters flanking the front windows and fluted Greek Doric columns flanking windows in the recessed quadrants, which have a triglyph frieze to the entablature. The roof over the centre projects back from the pediment with panelled corniced ridge chimneys. Similar chimneys sit on the low-pitched side roofs.

A long arcaded screen wall runs north and south, curved at the south alongside the entrance drive; some arches retain nineteenth-century wrought-iron railings. The west screen wall, dating from 1848, is built in ashlar with a moulded cornice and plain pilasters, extending the full length of the west platform and abutting part of the former goods station wall at its south end.

The footbridge, added in 1879 for the North Eastern Railway, is attached to the rear of the station. Scroll brackets support the cast-iron arched bridge, which features diagonally-braced parapets. Ashlar side steps are attached to the station and rear screen wall; the treads have been repaired in rough-textured concrete, and wrought-iron handrails are attached to the walls. The bridge itself has wood steps and footpath with boxed-in iron handrails.

The passenger waiting room on the west platform has walls boarded below and glazed above with upper glazing bars, half-glazed doors, and a fret-carved canopy valence to a Welsh slate roof, added after the train shed roof was removed.

The interior of the station shows a booking office installed in 1866 and restored to its condition of 1905, with windows having panelled shutters. The curved windows in the quadrant sections have lost their curved glass but retain shutters. Some fireplaces are obscured by museum displays; one has been revealed in the booking office. The upper floor formerly served as the station-master's house. The west waiting room has a boarded dado with wooden benches attached and a cast-iron fireplace with reeded pilasters and lintel below a sloped coping, inscribed with the NER monogram.

George Hudson, the railway entrepreneur, was chairman of the railway company that built the station and had been elected Member of Parliament for Sunderland in 1845.