Arriving in Port Sunlight from the south was not exactly promising. The highways took me past a warren of oil refineries, chemical plants, fertilizer manufacturers and a uranium enrichment plant. Every brief glimpse of the Mersey was framed by sloppy industrial estates and docks.
Then, with a single left turn, the world was suddenly calm, easy on the eyes, silent and vast. Road traffic slowed down. Pedestrians walked dogs and pushed strollers. Neat flower beds lined with grass verges. It suddenly felt like everything had been carefully planned.
And it was. Created by William Hesketh Lever, Port Sunlight is one of Britain's best-known model villages. Named after a brand of laundry soap produced in the neighboring factory, it was envisioned as a sunny, airy, healthy place to live. Both Port Sunlight, begun in 1888, and Bournville, from 1893, influenced Ebenezer Howard's Garden City Movement, which aimed to solve 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 'beautiful place', but was seen as 'far away'. The Wirral is not only on the other side of Liverpool, but, because it is a peninsula, with the Dee on the western bank, it is cut off from England and Wales. Yet Port Sunlight's existence is closely linked to my home in inland Lancashire.
Born in Bolton in 1851, Lever built up capital with a wholesale grocery business before switching to soap. New processes for making alkalis were causing a boom and Cornish entrepreneur Andrew Pears had already had great success with a transparent bar of soap for the mass market.
Initially, William Lever and his brother James used third-party 'soap kettles' for their own brands, including Sunlight - the world's first packaged branded laundry soap. They then rented a factory in Warrington and developed a new soap using vegetable oils instead of tallow. When demand exceeded their production capacity, they looked for a new location.
The story continues
The story of why William Lever chose the Wirral is told in Port Sunlight's lovely little museum, through maps, photographs, recordings and film reels. The area was swampy and crossed by tidal inlets, but there was a plentiful supply of labor in New Ferry and Birkenhead, river transport was convenient and there were good roads and direct rail links to Chester and London.
Lever, who eventually teamed up with a Dutch margarine company to create the multinational Unilever, wanted to provide its employees with a healthy and attractive environment. He employed civil engineers, landscapers and architects - more than thirty of the latter - who could add aesthetic beauty to his overall vision.
As a businessman, he wanted his employees to be happy so they could 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 image of a cottage crowned with a thatched roof, and with ivy and climbing roses and a little garden in the foreground suggesting old-fashioned floral scent, and a house in which contentment and happiness dwell, speaks directly to the heart of each of us, and few can feel its silent, peaceful influence resist for good."
The peace was still evident when I joined a walking tour led by volunteer guide Jenny Williams, who moved here from the Midlands. She led me and about half a dozen other visitors along wide, tree-lined avenues with wide sidewalks, through gardens and past bowling alleys. Gradually we got an impression of the wide range of living styles of Port Sunlight.
Warrington architect William Owen designed the first 28 houses with a Tudor flavour, on Bolton Road and Greendale Road in the south-west. He was also responsible for the village's first community building, Gladstone Hall (now a theatre), which opened in 1891. Such facilities were an important part of Lever's vision. There was a school, hospital, neo-Gothic church and a post office (now the old Tudor Rose Tea Rooms, flanked by red telephone boxes).
Other local architects added nods to their favorite 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 Belgian-style houses with gables and turrets on Windy Bank and some fine Flemish gables on Park Road. Bridge Cottage, where Lever and his wife lived for a while, is a hodgepodge of stained glass windows, pebble walls and a rather grand entrance.
Architecture students should be in their element here, with scaffolding, Doric columns and bay windows, tiled roofs, diapers, mullions and even heraldic accents. Add to that a deluge of monuments, including a sphinx, sundials and the great obelisk of the Leverhulme Monument, plus more of those telephone boxes, and I sometimes felt like I was in a Portmeirion fantasy. Like the fairytale film set Portmeirion, many of the buildings are Grade II listed, but the main difference is that the houses were - and still are - where ordinary people lived.
Of course I wanted to peek inside. Because they are houses, it is difficult. But a replica of an Edwardian workers' cottage shows what domestic life was like in 1913; fireplaces, some solid wood furniture, stone floors, a sewing table, a pewter bath. Before that time, this was a des-res home for a factory employee. The former Temperance Hotel, now (cheerfully) the Bridge Inn, is also from that period and you can eat, drink or stay there.
I asked Jenny what it was like living in Port Sunlight today. "I really appreciate its uniqueness, especially its industrial history and architecture," she said. "We still live next to the factory, but there is a general sense of peace and I like that."
The village has another world-class attraction. The Lady Lever Art Gallery - founded by the avid collector William when his wife Elizabeth died in 1913 - is home to one of Britain's finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings (including Millais's paintings). Bubbles as used in a Pears soap advert), as well as masterpieces by Turner, Constable and Joshua Reynolds.
As for the industrial setting, the soap-alkali story started in St Helens, near my childhood home, and traveled by canal and rail to Warrington, Widnes and Runcorn. Lever's plan was part of this centuries-long process. Without the factory there would have been no utopian village on the Wirral. No junk, no copper. No amount of soap can wash away the history that created the modern Northwest.
Essentials
Doubles at the Bridge Inn, a Greene King pub, starts at £58.50, room only. Port Sunlight and Bebington stations are on the Wirral Line and the village is just south of Birkenhead and easily accessible via the Mersey Tunnels or the M53.
Port Sunlight attractions and tours are open Wednesday to Sunday between 10am and 4.30pm. Entry to the museum and workers' cottage costs £8 (£5.50 for children). Walking tours (11.30am) cost £11 (£4 for children). The Lady Lever Art Gallery is free to enter. Donations welcome.
