Plea to back city centre transformation

• By Kevin Clark
  
  Wearsiders need to back local businesses if Sunderlands city centre transformation is to continue.
  
  That is the warning from Irish property investorJerry Fitzgerald, one half of Sunderland Properties Ltd.
  
  He and partner John McDonell have poured more than £5million into the Hawksley House development in John Street.
  
  Jerry believes the problem is that too many people still do not realise just how much the Sunniside area has been changed.
  
  "You would not believe – unless you had been here five years ago – how bad it was," he said. "The whole area was derelict.
  
  "What has been done is fantastic but we need to get people down here. They are not used to coming here."
  
  Irish-based Jerry has been involved with Sunderland since before the arrival of certain of his countrymen.
  
  "We have been involved in the city for more than five years now, since before the regeneration of the area started," he said.
  
  "There are a lot of people who think we jumped on the bandwagon when Niall Quinn arrived, but we were here two or three years before the football thing started.
  
  "We were informed by various people that there was going to be a major regeneration of the city centre, and we saw the potential here.
  
  "There has been a huge amount of progress and we wanted to be part of that.
  
  "But transforming the area is phase one – the next phase is to get people down here."
  
  He added: "There are five or six really excellent restaurants, five or six really excellent bars in this part of the city centre alone.
  
  "How do you get people to realise we have bars just like Newcastle, we have restaurants just like Newcastle, we have clubs just like Newcastle?
  
  "It can be done – 15 years ago, there were whole areas of Dublin where you just did not go – now it is one of the most visited cities in Europe."
  
  Source: Sunderland Echo