Miracle on Merseyside

Linda Hart explores one of the UK's most unusual villages

As you turn off the main road beside the Mersey and enter Port Sunlight, you know something is different. The streets and pavements are so wide; large green spaces with tidy flowerbeds are everywhere. The well-kept cottages are in different English vernacular styles but arranged in a neat and orderly fashion. The sign says 'Port Sunlight Village' but what kind of village has an enormous war memorial - the largest outside London - and a huge art gallery with Ionic porticos and two great domes?

The conundrum of Port Sunlight begins to unravel at the massive Leverhulme Memorial, opposite the art gallery, with figures on it representing Industry, Education, Charity, Inspiration and Art. The plaque on it reads: "To the honoured memory of William Hesketh, 1851-1925, First Viscount Leverhulme, founder of Lever Bros Ltd and Port Sunlight, a man remarkable for his business ability, his public benefactions and his love of beauty and art, this monument is erected by his fellow workers."

The story starts in 1887 when William Lever, a successful soap manufacturer, needed to find a large site near a river and railway in order to build a big soap factory. He chose marshy ground on the Wirral and transformed it, first with his vast manufacturing plant and soon afterwards with the construction of an entire village to house his workers.

He named the village Port Sunlight - after the soap bars he had introduced into so many British homes with his unconventional marketing techniques. The soap was sold in bright eye-catching cartons that bore a pledge of purity, and he offered �£1,000 reward to anyone finding a harmful additive. He distributed gifts and souvenirs to keep the brand's name in front of the public. He took full-page advertisements in newspapers that superimposed the words 'Sunlight Soap' over the paintings of famous Victorian artists such as W.P. Frith. It all contributed to his creation of a vast business empire.

But Lever believed that he should share his prosperity with those who worked for him. "The truest and highest form of enlightened self-interest," he said, "requires that we pay the fullest regard to the interest and welfare of those around us." Using a combination of his own money and the profits from the new factory, he built this picturesque garden village with good-quality homes, plenty of green open spaces, and public buildings such as a school, library, theatre, concert hall, recreation hall, cottage hospital, dining room, general store, open air swimming bath and a temperance hotel.

Cottages for all

Port Sunlight was four miles across the Mersey from Liverpool but it might have been a million miles away, given the sharp contrast with the appalling housing and social conditions found in our industrial cities at the time. Lever believed that, "The cottage home is the unit of the nation." He employed more than 30 architects to design the buildings, and no two blocks of cottages are the same.

Eight hundred 3-bed and 4-bed homes were built between 1889 and 1914. The earliest are of simple design, but as time went by the cottages increasingly displayed features such as half-timbering, pargeted gables, leaded glazing lights, carved woodwork and masonry, moulded and twisted chimneys.

Lever encouraged the creation of village organisations to promote art, literature, science, music and sport. (In 1909 there were 28 different clubs and societies in the village.) He set up schemes for the welfare, education and entertainment of the community, declaring that, "Sharing of prosperity makes life easier, better, brighter and higher for all." For many years all of Port Sunlight's children received a book on their birthday from Mr and Mrs Lever.

Today at Port Sunlight the factory still manufactures a range of products by Unilever (the successor company to Lever Brothers). There are approximately 3,000 residents living in 900 dwellings - each one a Grade II listed building - and the entire village is a designated Conservation Area. The Heritage Centre provides an excellent introduction to the history of the village. Here you will find scale models, videos showing early film footage of residents at work and at play, copies of the original plans for the buildings, and displays of period advertising and soap packaging.

Don't miss the room depicting how the kitchen at the Percivals' cottage would have been furnished in 1914, when King George V and Queen Mary visited Port Sunlight to lay the foundation stone of the art gallery. Imagine Mr and Mrs Percival's surprise, as they watched the royal visit from an upstairs window at 20 Bolton Road, when the royal couple decided to make an impromptu visit to their cottage.

From the Heritage Centre, I explored Port Sunlight with the help of a Village Trail leaflet, stopping to look at the Percivals' house (with a plaque on it), as well as The Dell, The Lyceum, Hulme Hall, the Bridge Inn, the war memorial, the church and the village school, before arriving at the Lady Lever Art Gallery.