by Coming to Port Sunlight from the south was not so promising. The motorways took me beyond oil refineries, chemical plants, fertilizer manufacturers and a uranium enrichment plant. Any brief view of the Mersey was punctuated by untidy industrial estates and docks.
Then, with one turn to the left, the world was suddenly calm, easy on the eye, hushed and spacious. Slow down the road traffic. Pedestrians walked dogs and pushed prams. Neat flower beds lined with grass verges. It felt, suddenly, as if everything had been carefully planned.
And there was. Port Sunlight, created by William Hesketh Lever, is one of the most famous model villages in the UK. Named after a brand of laundry soap produced in the nearby factory, it was considered a sunny, airy, life-giving abode. Port Sunlight, started in 1888, and Bournville, from 1893, influenced Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement, which aimed to solve the problems of unhealthy, overcrowded cities and poor working class conditions. agricultural.
I grew up just 20 miles east of the model village. It was sometimes referred to as a “beautiful place” but it was felt to be “far away”. Not only is the Wirral on the other side of Liverpool but, being a peninsula, with the Nith on its western shore, it is cut off from England and Wales. But life in Port Sunlight is closely linked to my inland Lancashire home.
Lever, born in 1851 in Bolton, raised capital with a wholesale grocery business before moving on to soap. New alkali-making processes were booming and Cornish entrepreneur Andrew Pears was already very successful with a bar of transparent supermarket soap.
Initially William Lever and his brother James used third party “soap makers” for their own brands, including Sunlight – the world’s first packaged, branded laundry soap. They then leased a factory in Warrington and developed a new soap using vegetable oils instead of tallow. When demand outgrew their production capacity, they looked for a new location.
Why William Lever chose the Wirral is told at Port Sunlight’s beautiful little museum, through maps, photographs, recordings and film reels. The area was marshy and criss-crossed by tidal inlets, but there was a ready supply of labor in New Ferry and Birkenhead, river transport was convenient, and there were good roads as well as direct rail links to Chester and London.
Lever, which eventually merged with a Dutch margarine firm to found the multinational giant Unilever, wanted to provide a healthy and attractive environment for its workers. He hired civil engineers, landscapers and architects – more than 30 of them – who could bring aesthetic beauty to his overall vision.
As a businessman, he wanted his workers to be happy so that they would be productive. But, as he explained in a 1915 lecture entitled “Art and Beauty and the City”, he also believed that a person’s moral character was determined by the quality of his home: “The picture of a cottage crowned with thatched roof, and clinging ivy and climbing roses and the foreground of a small garden suggesting the old-fashioned perfume of flowers, and a house living on content and happiness, appeal directly to the heart of each of us, and some are able to resist its quiet, peaceful influence. for good.”
The peace was still evident when I went on a walking tour led by volunteer guide Jenny Williams, who moved here from the Midlands. She led me and half a dozen other visitors along wide avenues of trees with wide paths, past gardens and bowling greens. Along the way we gained an understanding of the wide range of Port Sunlight residential styles.
Architect William Owen Warrington designed the first 28 Tudor-style houses, on Bolton Road and Greendale Road to the south-west. He was also responsible for the village’s first community building, Gladstone Hall (now a theatre), which opened in 1891. Such amenities were central to Lever’s vision. There was a school, a hospital, a neo-Gothic church and a post office (now the world’s Tudor Rose Tea Rooms, flanked by red telephone boxes).
Other local architects gave nods to their favorite eras and architectural styles, including the young Edwin Lutyens, who designed four houses on Corniche Road with Venetian windows and hanging tiles. Take a look around and you’ll see Elizabethan and Tudor revivals, as well as the Belgian-style gabled houses and turrets on Windy Bank and some fine Flemish Penthouses on Park Road. Bridge Cottage, where Lever and his wife lived for a time, is a melange of leaded windows, finger walls and a rather large entrance.
Architecture students must be in their element here, ticking piers, Doric columns and oriel windows, pantiled roofs, diapers, mullions and even heraldic touches. Add an abundance of monuments including a sphinx, a sun skull and a large Leverhulme memorial obelisk, plus more of those phone boxes, and I sometimes felt like I was in a fantasy in Portmeirion. As in the Portmeirion fairy tale film series, many of the buildings are listed, but the main difference is that the houses were – and still are – inhabited by ordinary people.
Of course, I wanted to peek inside. Because they are houses, it is tricky. But a replica of an Edwardian worker’s cottage shows what life was like in the town in 1913; open fires, several pieces of solid wood furniture, stone floors, sewing table, tin bath. During its time, this was a home des-res for a factory employee. The former Temperance Hotel, now the Bridge Inn, is also of the period, and you can eat, drink or stay there.
I asked Jenny how it was living in Port Sunlight today. “I appreciate its uniqueness, especially its industrial history and architecture,” she said. “We’re still alive and laughing with the factory, but there’s an overall sense of peace that suits me well.”
The village has another excellent attraction. The Lady Lever Art Gallery – founded by the avid collector William after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, in 1913 – houses one of the UK’s finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings (including the work of Millais bubblesas used in the Pears soap ad), as well as masterpieces by Turner, Constable and Joshua Reynolds.
As for the industrial setting: well, the soap-alkali story began in St Helens, near my childhood home, and traveled by canal and rail to Warrington, Widnes and Runcorn. Lever’s scheme was part of this centennial process. Without the factory there would be no utopian village on the Wirral. No mud, no brass. No amount of soap can scrub away the history that created the modern North West.
Basics
Doubles at the Bridge Inn, a Greene King pub, start at £58.50, one room. Port Sunlight and Bebington stations are on the Wirral Line and the village is just south of Birkenhead, easily accessible via the Mersey Tunnels or the M53.
Port Sunlight attractions and sightseeing tours open from Wednesday to Sunday between 10am and 4.30pm. Entry to the museum and the worker’s house is £8 (£5.50 for children). Walking tours (11.30am) cost £11 (£4 for children). Admission to the Lady Lever Art Gallery is free. Donations welcome.
