Kate Adie guest speaks at Sunderland festival

Kate Adie at the launch of Sunderland on Film, with Coun John Kelly and Graham Relton, in Sunderland Minster

Broadcaster Kate Adie reflected on her fond memories of growing up in Sunderland.

The journalist was back in her home city to speak ahead of a screening of a nostalgic look back at Wearside’s heritage.

The Sunderland On Film screening, which took place at Sunderland Minster, was held as part of the Sunderland Literature Festival which sees a host of events taking place across venues over the next month.

Speaking at tonight’s sold-out event, Kate said: “I particularly remember going to the library in town, it was a central part of my childhood, seeing how many books I could borrow.

“You could only borrow four at a time and I remember walking past the librarian with a tower of books seeing how many I could take out. It was in the Winter Gardens then, which is a beautiful building.”

A partnership between Sunderland City Council and the North East Film Archive, the screening uses footage from the 1900s to the present day, touching upon Royal and Presidential visits, the opening of the Nissan plant and Sunderland AFC’s historic 1973 FA Cup win.

Kate added: “There’s a lot of film from the twentieth century, less of individual movies as not everyone could afford a camera. It shows a very different world and jogs a lot of memories for me, my roots are here and I come back often.

“It was a very cultural town when I was growing up, and still is.”

Graham Relton from North East Film Archive said: “We’re a charity aimed at preserving moving images of the North East. We have vaults in Teesside University with 30,000 plus films. From that we looked at what was digitised and how we could take people on a journey through film.

“It’s part entertaining, part informative, but it also gives people ownership of their film heritage. We want to make people proud of these collective moments, it’s their ancestors caught on film.”