From Our House to Yours

We’re very excited to welcome you to Culture House Sunderland when we open our doors next year. But we know that culture doesn’t start and stop at the doors of a venue. It lives across the city, in the stories we share, and the places we carry with us.  

From Our House to Yours is a city-wide photography project and exhibition celebrating the personal landmarks that root us in Sunderland: from the obvious to the overlooked, the shared to the secret.  

As part of the pre-opening programme for Culture House Sunderland, we’re inviting everyone across the city to add their own photos to this new collection. We want you to show us your local landmarks: the places that matter to you.  

We aren’t asking for pictures of your living room, but the places that truly feel like home: 

Where were you when you found out you got the job? 

Where do you take visitors when you want to show off the best of the city? 

What’s the first thing you see when you return from a trip that makes you feel, “I’m home”? 

Submitted photographs will be hosted in Culture House Sunderland’s online collection, and will be in the running to feature in an exhibition in Culture House Sunderland when it opens in 2026. Those who join in will be invited to our Housewarming events – so join us and help build Sunderland’s new collection of shared, and personal, landmarks. 

Submit your photographs here 

Submission notes: 

• Please submit your own photos of Sunderland landscapes and landmarks.  
• Please try and submit photos without any people in them. 
• Please share the story of the photo and why it is important to you. 
• Please don’t submit anyone else’s photos, unless you have asked their permission. 
• Please don’t submit photos showing the inside of your home, or anything that identifies the location of your home address.  
• Please don’t submit photos featuring people where they can be identified. 
• Once your photograph has been submitted, it will be checked for approval and then added to the online collection  

The Exhibition 

At the end of last year, five photographers – Simon Green, Sel MacLean, Alistair MacDonald, Hazel Plater and Andy Wilkinson – were commissioned by Culture House Sunderland to explore and capture the five areas of the city. The images they returned with are a rich mix of the iconic and the intimate: familiar landscapes sit alongide the things only locals might notice – the way a certain bridge looks at dawn, the graffiti you pass on your walk home, the corner shop where everyone knows your name. In this exhibition, From Our House to Yours, Culture House Sunderland presents a curated selection of these local landmarks.  

All of the images are housed online in Culture House Sunderland’s Digital Collection.  

Visit the exhibition at Expo Sunderland Pavilion, Keel Square until 2 November 2025.