Port Sunlight: A Great Idea

August 25: Chester would make a reasonable base for a day trip to Liverpool, which I am told now has a revitalized river area, with good new museums. However, none of the museums particularly interested me, and I chose to visit Port Sunlight on the Wirral peninsula instead. Although my elder sister and her family had lived on the Wirral, between the Mersey and the Dee, for some years, and we had visited often, somehow we had never gone to Port Sunlight, even though we lived in Letchworth, the First Garden City, a town begun on somewhat similar principles.
Port Sunlight was built as a company town, but it should in no way be confused with the infamous company towns in the US designed by mine owners to effectively enslave their workers. Lord Leverhulme, born William Lever, the founder of Lever Brothers (now part of Unilever), wanted his employees to have healthy accommodation with light and air, and the village was laid out with plenty of open space and facilities for communal activity. He also provided health care for his employees, and was an advocate of old age pensions. Although the excellent small museum informed me that the houses had been built in north-west vernacular style, many of them could have been transplanted from Letchworth, in the south-east. Port Sunlight was begun a couple of decades before Letchworth, but the Quaker founders of the latter were in close contact with Lord Lever, and the 1902 meeting of the Garden City Association was held in Liverpool with Lord Leverhulme presiding, so the similarities are perhaps not surprising. Letchworth, however, was a town rather than a village, much bigger and with a commercial center and multiple factories.

Among the facilities for communal activity were dining halls – separated by sex in the early years – and a hall for concerts. I was interested to discover that the first concert the Beatles performed after Ringo Starr took over as drummer, was held in Port Sunlight. Of course, the village is no longer so tied to Unilever, although there is still a factory on site, and the current arrangements, which include restrictions on the appearance of the buildings, expire next year. The communal ethos led to a mass sign up of volunteers for the First World War, and a large war memorial dominates a central park. Nearby is a memorial area for the victims of the Hillsborough soccer disaster in 1989. In contrast I found an unusual floral sun dial. If you stood on the correct month stone, your shadow would fall on the stone for the hour – one set for “natural” time, and one for summer time. As the instructions pointed out, you needed sunshine for it to work, and therefore I couldn’t try it.

Lord Leverhulme amassed a considerable collection of art, and built a classically-styled museum to hold it. Unfortunately, I was rather tired by the time I visited it, and didn’t spend as much time as it deserved inside. I did admire a considerable collection of Wedgewood china, an unusual Tang horse, and some Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Walking to one of the two stations serving the village to catch a commuter train back to Chester, I passed a bowling green with a small group of serious-looking men in possession. Further on, a larger group of women were also playing bowls, and on chatting to one of them I learned they were on a group outing. I’m sure Lord Leverhulme would have approved.