Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens

[1] It was established in 1846, in the Athenaeum Building on Fawcett Street, the first municipally funded museum in the country outside London.

The first recorded fine art acquisition was commissioned by the Sunderland Corporation, a painting of the opening of the new South Dock in 1850.

[2] In 1879, the Museum moved to a new larger building next to Mowbray Park including a library and winter garden based on the model of the Crystal Palace.

[7] Other highlights of the Museum are a stuffed Lion which was acquired in 1879,[8] the remains of a walrus brought back from Siberia in the 1880s and the first Nissan car to be made in Sunderland.

John Morrison wrote an affectionate memoir of the two and a half years he spent working in the museum as a junior curator, starting about 1918, which appeared in the Australian literary journal Overland in 1968.

My Daddy Wears one of These, a teacher (himself blind) at Sunderland Council Blind School teaches a blind child the shape of First World War helmets through handling them. Beginning in 1913, John Alfred Charlton Deas, a former curator at Sunderland Museum, organised several handling sessions for the blind. This included an invitation to the school to handle some of the museum collection, which was 'eagerly accepted'.