Record stores in Sunderland

Vinyl hunting in Sunderland, England? There are 17 record shops mapped here. That's 17 record shops mapped around Sunderland. Every shop grades and prices differently, so the same record can be a bargain in one and a splurge in another — dig everywhere. The new-arrivals bin is always the first stop — that's where the good stuff lands before anyone else sees it.

This guide covers every record store we could verify in and around Sunderland (within about 40 km), built from OpenStreetMap's community-maintained data. Names you'll run into include Air Guitars and First for Music, plus Hot Rats Records. If a record shop's missing from Sunderland's list, it probably just hasn't been mapped yet.

The Sunderland record lineup

17 mapped within about 40 km:

What the map tells us about record stores in Sunderland

2 of the 17 list their opening hours on the map, which is genuinely useful — record shops keep shop hours, so the listed times are usually reliable.

7 have websites listed. Worth a look for new-arrival posts and want-list services.

There's a cluster: 2 of them sit on Market Place, so you can string those into one walk and drive between the rest.

The Sunderland record crawl

The efficient Sunderland record crawl strings these together: Air Guitars, First for Music, Hot Rats Records on Mary Street, HMV on The Bridges Shopping Centre, HMV on 28 Blackettbridge, Reflex on 23 Nun Street, Mama Roux Records on Whitley Road, and Stay Free Records on 142 Northumberland Street — 17 stops, one logical order. 9 more are listed below.

Record digging tips for Sunderland

A few things worth knowing before you work through Sunderland's record stores:

• Check for box sets at Air Guitars. Box sets get broken up or sold whole; either way the per-record price is often excellent.
• Learn your labels at First for Music. Certain labels mean certain quality. A quick education in the labels of your favourite genres pays off fast.
• Buy the weird stuff. Private pressings, local bands, oddball compilations — the strange records are the ones that appreciate.
• Genre-hop. The best finds are in the sections you don't know. Jazz collectors find gold in the classical bins and vice versa.

Good to know

We searched about 40 km around Sunderland — that covers the town itself plus the surrounding communities you'd reasonably drive to. Listings come from OpenStreetMap, mapped by local volunteers, so a brand-new record store in Sunderland can take a while to appear. Spotted a closure among the 17, or a record store we missed entirely? The map is the source of truth here — one OpenStreetMap edit corrects it for everyone.

We don't list prices or stock — both change by the day. What we list is the where: real shops, verified by real mappers.

If you run one of the 17 listed here and something's wrong — a closure, a move, new hours — the fix is the same: update the shop on OpenStreetMap and the correction flows through to this page on the next daily refresh.