It’s impossible to be a native of Sunderland and not to have at least a passing interest in football. If you’ve seen the Netflix series Sunderland ‘Til I Die, you’ll know that in my home town, football is more of a religion than a leisure activity. It’s a passion that extends back to the foundation of Sunderland Association Football Club (SAFC) in 1879, whose nickname is the Black Cats.

Growing up, football was always a topic of discussion in our house. My dad played Sunday League football for many years and my Uncle Gordon Howe was a professional footballer. But to the general disappointment of my family, I’ve never had a deep interest in the sport, though I do keep a watch on how well the team of my birthplace is doing. And as of yesterday they are doing extremely well! The team beat Sheffield United (ironically, one of the teams that Uncle Gordon played for) in a thrilling, close-run match to earn promotion back into the Premier League. I watched it live with friends in a local pub, and there was a great reception to the win, even among customers who had no vested interest in the club.

It brought back memories of the mid-1970s when I attended matches at SAFC’s old Roker Park stadium, buoyed up by the club’s ‘giant killing’ win over Leeds United in the 1973 FA Cup Final. But even after my childhood interest in football waned, replaced by a growing fascination with natural history, home matches were frequently a backdrop to Saturdays. The famous Roker Roar always signaled that the team had scored. That shout echoed across the town and down through the Magnesian Limestone gorge of the River Wear, part of which you can see in the photograph above. Exploring the exposed geology, and the grassland and brownfield habitats of that river valley, is an important reason why I became an ecologist, as I recounted on the blog a decade ago.

The shot was taken in early 1986 and it shows the view from the back of the house in which I grew up. On the south side of the river, you can see cranes and sheds associated with the shipbuilding industry, for hundreds of years one of the two main engines of the local economy. Directly ahead, situated on a promontory, you can see an example of the second engine: Wearmouth Colliery, a 2,000 ft deep coal mine that extended out under the North Sea. The mine employed quite a number of members of my family, including my grandfather and several uncles*, one of whom was killed in the early 1900s after a pit pony kicked him. My dad was also a miner for a time but he worked further up river at the Hylton Colliery, which produced more than its fair share of professional footballers, as well as coal.

In 1993 Wearmouth Colliery closed and the site was quickly cleared – see this amazing set of photos that was taken at the time. Four years later, SAFC closed Roker Park and moved to a new purpose-built stadium on the colliery site. They called it The Stadium of Light, a name that honours the ‘miners at Wearmouth Colliery [who] carried with them a Davy lamp as part of their working lives’. Here’s a shot of the stadium perched above the river, taken by my good friend Mark:

Not only have Sunderland gone up, they have also gone green, with a commitment to be carbon neutral and generate their own power from solar installations (though that scheme has attracted some controversy). They are also making the team’s kit from recycled plastic bottles and looking at more environmentally friendly ways of dealing with match day waste – see this press release on their ‘Ready Eco’ initiative. There’s also a plan to tap into the geothermal potential of the mine to heat local houses, though that has been delayed, unless anyone has more recent news on the scheme?

Biodiversity, always the Cinderella of environmental mission statements, is missing from that initiative, which is a shame because the stadium lies adjacent to some very interesting habitats. To the left of the stadium, on the steep slopes of the gorge, you can see patches of Magnesian Limestone Grassland, a relatively rare plant community that is virtually confined to the North East of England.

This minor gripe aside, it’s great to see Sunderland being promoted and taking a lead in thinking about how football as the national sport has an environmental impact. It makes me even prouder of my home town.

*When I was researching this post I came across the following article from the local newspaper. It mentions my Uncle Walter Ollerton who earned a safety badge that is still in my possession. At the outbreak of World War 2 he enlisted and fought in the Far East, where he was captured by the Japanese and held in a prisoner of war camp. After his release he returned to his job as a miner in Sunderland, but his health was never the same: