Sunderland Aquatic Centre
indoor sports complex in Sunderland, England
Sunderland Aquatic Centre is an indoor sports complex next to the Stadium of Light in the city of Sunderland, England. It contains an Olympic-size swimming pool, a diving pool and a gymnasium. It is the only full Olympic-standard pool in North East England between Glasgow and Leeds.
The centre was opened on 18 April 2008 with a fireworks and lights display. Anne, Princess Royal visited the Aquatic Centre on 22 January 2009 and gave it a second 'opening' ceremony. A third ceremony was held in the presence of the Mayor of Sunderland Mary Smith later that year.
It replaced the swimming pool and gymnasium facilities at the Crowtree Leisure Centre, which was opened in 1978 by Prince Charles. The pool at Crowtree had a tropical beach style with a slide, two diving pools and a wave machine, and was not an Olympic-standard pool. The centre was closed to the general public in October 2011 and demolished in 2013.
On 16 June 2012, the Olympic torch was carried through the Aquatic Centre as part of the 2012 Summer Olympics torch relay.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7639688. Authority coordinates are 54.914, -1.390. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2009, 1978 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sunderland Aquatic Centre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.