The Merseyside housing estate that influenced the Garden City Movement
Arriving at Port Sunlight from the south was less than promising. The motorways took me past a jumble of oil refineries, chemical plants, fertiliser manufacturers and a uranium enrichment factory. Any brief glimpses of the Mersey were framed by untidy industrial estates and docks.
Then, with a single left turn, the world was suddenly calm, easy on the eye, hushed and expansive. The road traffic slowed. Pedestrians walked dogs and pushed prams. Neat flower beds lined grass verges. It felt, suddenly, as though everything had been carefully planned.
And it had. Port Sunlight, created by William Hesketh Lever, is one of the UK’s best-known model villages. Named after a brand of laundry soap produced at the neighbouring factory, it was envisioned as a sunny, airy, health-giving place to live. Both Port Sunlight, begun in 1888, and Bournville, from 1893, influenced Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement, which aimed to find a solution to the problems of unhealthy, overcrowded cities and the poor conditions of the agricultural classes.
I grew up just 20 miles east of the model village. It was sometimes mentioned as a “lovely place” but was perceived as being “a long way away”. The Wirral is not only on t’other side of Liverpool but, being a peninsula, with the Dee on its western shore, it’s cut off from England and Wales. Yet Port Sunlight’s existence is intimately connected to my inland Lancashire home.
Lever, born in 1851 in Bolton, built up capital with a wholesale grocery concern before moving on to soap. New alkali-making processes were triggering a boom and the Cornish entrepreneur Andrew Pears had already had great success with a transparent mass-market soap bar.
Initially William Lever and his brother James used third-party “soap boilers” for their own brands, including Sunlight – the world’s first packaged, branded laundry soap. Then they leased a factory in Warrington and developed a new soap using vegetable oils rather than tallow. When demand outgrew their production capacity, they looked for a new site.
The story of why William Lever chose the Wirral is told at Port Sunlight’s lovely 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 labour in New Ferry and Birkenhead, river transport was handy, and there were good roads as well as direct rail links to Chester and London.
Lever, who eventually teamed up with a Dutch margarine firm to found the multinational giant Unilever, wanted to provide his workers with a healthy and attractive environment. He employed civil engineers, landscapers and architects – more than 30 of the latter – who could bring aesthetic beauty to his overall vision.
As a businessman, he wanted his workers to be happy so they could be productive. But, as he explained in a 1915 lecture titled “Art and Beauty and the City”, he also believed that a person’s moral character was determined by the quality of their home:“The picture of a cottage crowned with a thatched roof, and with clinging ivy and climbing roses and a small garden foreground suggesting old-fashioned perfume of flowers, and a home in which dwell content and happiness, appeals straight to the heart of each of us, and there are few that can resist its quiet, peaceful influence for good.”
The peace was still in evidence as I joined a walking tour led by volunteer-guide Jenny Williams, who relocated here from the Midlands. She led me and half a dozen other visitors along broad, tree-lined avenues with wide pavements, through gardens and past bowling greens. Along the way we got a sense of the broad range of Port Sunlight’s residential styles.
Warrington architect William Owen designed the first 28 houses with a Tudor flavour, 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 a key part of Lever’s vision. There was a school, hospital, neo-Gothic church and a post office (now the olde worlde Tudor Rose Tea Rooms, flanked by red telephone boxes).
Other local architects added nods to their favourite eras and architectural styles, including a young Edwin Lutyens, who designed four houses on Corniche Road complete with Venetian windows and hanging tiles. Look around and you’ll see Elizabethan revivalism and Tudor revivalism, as well as the gabled and turreted Belgian-style houses on Windy Bank and some fine Flemish Gables on Park Road. Bridge Cottage, where Lever and his wife lived for a spell, is a melange of leaded windows, pebbled walls and a rather grand entrance.
Architecture students must be in their element here, ticking off jettying, Doric columns and oriel windows, pantiled roofs, diapers, mullions and even heraldic touches. Add a flurry of monuments including a sphinx, sundials and the grand obelisk of the Leverhulme memorial, as well as more of those telephone boxes, and I sometimes felt I was in a Portmeirion-style fantasy. As in the fairy tale film set that is Portmeirion, many of the buildings are listed, but the key difference is that ordinary people lived – and still live – in the houses.
Of course, I wanted to peek inside. As they are homes, it’s tricky. But a replica of an Edwardian worker’s cottage shows what domestic life was like in 1913; open fires, a few pieces of solid wooden furniture, stone floors, a sewing table, a tin bath. For its time, this was a des-res home for a factory employee. The former Temperance Hotel, now (merrily) the Bridge Inn, is also of the period, and you can eat, drink or stay there.
I asked Jenny what it was like to live in Port Sunlight today. “I very much appreciate its uniqueness, especially its industrial history and architecture,” she said. “We still live cheek by jowl with the factory, but there is an overall feeling of peace which suits me fine.”
The village has one further world-class attraction. The Lady Lever Art Gallery – established by avid collector William when his wife, Elizabeth, died in 1913 – houses one of the UK’s finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings (including Millais’s Bubbles, as used in a Pears soap ad), as well as masterpieces by Turner, Constable and Joshua Reynolds.
As for the industrial setting: well, the soap-alkali story started in St Helens, near my childhood home, and travelled by canal and railway to Warrington, Widnes and Runcorn. Lever’s scheme was part of this century-long process. Without the factory there would have been no utopian village on the Wirral. No muck, no brass. No amount of soap can scrub away the history that created the modern North West.
Essentials
Doubles at the Bridge Inn, a Greene King pub, start at £58.50, room only. Port Sunlight and Bebington stations are on the Wirral Line and the village is just south of Birkenhead, easy to reach via the Mersey Tunnels or the M53.
Port Sunlight’s attractions and sightseeing tours open from Wednesday to Sunday between 10am and 4.30pm. Admission to the museum and worker’s cottage costs £8 (£5.50 for children). Walking tours (11.30am) are £11 (£4 for children). The Lady Lever Art Gallery is free to enter. Donations welcome.
