St Peter's is the home of The Sir Tom Cowie Campus at the University of Sunderland on the north bank of the River Wear. It is named after the adjacent St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth.
The University of Sunderland is a university located in Sunderland in the North East of England. Its predecessor, Sunderland Technical College, was established as a municipal training college in 1901. It gained university status in 1992. It now has campuses in Sunderland, London and Hong Kong. The university has 13,020 students and was one of six universities to be short-listed for 'University of the Year' in the Times Higher Education Supplement Awards 2012.
The River Wear in North East England rises in the Pennines and flows eastwards, mostly through County Durham to the North Sea in the City of Sunderland. At 60 mi (97 km) long, it is one of the region's longest rivers, wends in a steep valley through the cathedral city of Durham and gives its name to Weardale in its upper reach and Wearside by its mouth.
St Peter's Church, Monkwearmouth is the parish church of Monkwearmouth in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England. It is one of three churches in the Parish of Monkwearmouth. The others are All Saints' Church, Monkwearmouth and St Andrew's Church, Roker.
It is also the name of the Tyne and Wear Metro Station nearest to the campus, which is next to Wearmouth Bridge.
St Peter's Metro Station on the Tyne and Wear Metro is the nearest one to the University of Sunderland's St Peter's Campus. The station was built for the Sunderland extension in 2002. It is located at the northern approach viaducts of the Monkwearmouth railway bridge and a short distance south of Monkwearmouth Station Museum.
The Tyne and Wear Metro, referred to locally as simply the Metro, is a rapid transit and light rail system in North East England, serving Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, South Tyneside, North Tyneside and Sunderland in the Tyne and Wear region. It has been described as the first modern light rail system in the United Kingdom.
Wearmouth Bridge is a through arch bridge across the River Wear in Sunderland. It is the final bridge over the river before its mouth with the North Sea.
The campus is adjacent to some of the pieces of the St Peter's Riverside Sculpture Project. Pathways of Knowledge, a pile of books located outside of the University's library, was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993. They are a reference to Bede and the Great Library of St Peter's. [1]
Bede, also known as Saint Bede, Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable, was an English Benedictine monk at the monastery of St. Peter and its companion monastery of St. Paul in the Kingdom of Northumbria of the Angles. Born on lands likely belonging to the Monkwearmouth monastery in present day Sunderland, Bede was sent there at the age of seven and later joined Abbot Ceolfrith at the Jarrow monastery, both of whom survived a plague that struck in 686, an outbreak that killed a majority of the population there. While he spent most of his life in the monastery, Bede travelled to several abbeys and monasteries across the British Isles, even visiting the archbishop of York and King Ceolwulf of Northumbria. He is well known as an author, teacher, and scholar, and his most famous work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, gained him the title "The Father of English History". His ecumenical writings were extensive and included a number of Biblical commentaries and other theological works of exegetical erudition. Another important area of study for Bede was the academic discipline of computus, otherwise known to his contemporaries as the science of calculating calendar dates. One of the more important dates Bede tried to compute was Easter, an effort that was mired with controversy. He also helped establish the practice of dating forward from the birth of Christ, a practice which eventually became commonplace in medieval Europe. Bede was one of the greatest teachers and writers of the Early Middle Ages and is considered by many historians to be the single most important scholar of antiquity for the period between the death of Pope Gregory I in 604 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800.
