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Team celebrates as boat launched on River Wear

Jim Scott
BBC News, North East and Cumbria
Reporting fromSunderland
Pamela Tickell
BBC News, North East and Cumbria
BBC Peter Johnson and Philip Smith stand in front of the Lilian boat. It is a small open fishing boat painted black, white and blue.BBC
Peter Johnson and Philip Smith were part of the Sunderland Maritime Heritage who built the boat from scratch

Volunteers have launched what they believe to be the first boat built in Sunderland since the loss of the shipyards nearly 40 years ago.

Lilian is a 20ft (6m) replica of a Wearside foy coble used over many centuries to ferry goods and people along the North Sea coast.

Sunderland Maritime Heritage (SMH) has been working on building the vessel since 2019, with lead boatbuilder Philip Smith saying it required "every skill... that would have been done on the Wear 30, 40 years ago".

Mr Smith celebrated the launch by saying it "didn't leak, it didn't sink", following its successful maiden voyage.

Wearside's shipbuilding history dates back to 1346 and was once dubbed "the largest shipbuilding town in the world".

Throughout its history, Sunderland had more than 400 registered shipyards, with the last closing in 1988.

SMH trustee Peter Johnson said the foy coble would have been a "regular boat" on the Wear and "all over the place".

Sunderland Maritime Heritage Eight volunteer shipbuilders are working on the boat in a warehouse.Sunderland Maritime Heritage
Volunteers have been working on building the boat since 2019
Four men in the boat out at sea. They are waving at the camera. The boat is small and painted black, blue and white.
Lilian was successfully launched on the River Wear
Handout A composite of two photographs which include a young child, on the left, wearing a green jacket and blue jeans and standing in front of a coble boat with a yellow-coloured name, Leslie, in the 1970s. The second is of a girl, Isabella, who is wearing a light pink fleece and a pink coat with flowers on it, recreates the photo, on the right, and stands in front of the replica vessel which is named Lilian.Handout
Five-year-old Isabella (right), who is the granddaughter of one of the builders, recreates a photo from 1970 of a child standing next to Leslie, the boat Lilian is based on

SMH said it had taken four years to create and "started life as a few planks of wood" from a "couple of trees".

Loved ones and spectators waved the Lilian off on her first journey.

The vessel has already been sold to a private buyer and will live on in the River Tyne.

Mr Johnson said: "It was never about building a boat to sell, it was about learning how to build a boat."

When asked if the team was taking anymore orders, Mr Johnson added: "We have a squad of builders now, so who knows."

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