18 August 2016 - Lyons Farm, Melling, Kirkby, near Liverpool, Merseyside

We passed yesterday in a very domestic manner, attending to laundry and to supermarket shopping which is an endless business. Late in the afternoon, after the washing had all dried in the sunshine and gentle breeze, and the agricultural machinery had passed back and forth just beyond our camp,  we received a call from Pete of Chapelhouse Motors to let us know they expected the Sorrento back from the engineer’s workshop tomorrow morning. In the intervening days, we had requested a service for the vehicle to be done at the same time, and he suggested that might be done on Thursday. But we were anxious to have some surety, not wanting to sit about day after day just in case the call came for us to drive north to Ainsdale and swap vehicles. Alas matters remained a little vague, but we decided we would treat the day as a “touring day” and just deal with whatever else arose.

So another beautiful sunny day arrived this morning, the last for a while if the weather forecasts are to be believed. Lunch packed and no call yet from the garage, we headed away toward Wirral in our little Suzuki, out the gate by 9am, but back before long. No sooner had we travelled beyond Kirkby than Chris realised he had left his cellphone on the table. Any other day I would have counselled him to let it go, but we were still expecting word from Pete, and the only telephone number he had was Chris’s.

The Wirral, lying in the county of Cheshire, is the peninsula that lies between the wide estuary of the River Dee to the south, and the River Mersey to the north. The peninsula, sort of rectangular in shape, is about 15 miles long and 7 miles wide, and is known principally as the location of Birkenhead, the manufacturing sister of the Ports of Liverpool, across the river. Best known of its past manufacturing industries is ship building.

The peninsula can be reached by driving south east from Liverpool and crossing the River Mersey near Runcorn or Widnes, or catching a ferry across the river, a journey made famous in song, or crossing on the train through the tunnel, or as we did today, driving through the two mile Queensway Tunnel. For one who is a little claustrophobic, those two miles are very very long. At the time of its opening in 1934, it was the longest road tunnel in the world, and remained so until the Vielha Tunnel in Spain was opened in 1948. Construction took nine years during which seventeen men were killed, 1% of the work force engaged for the work. It is one of three tunnels under the River Mersey, the first the rail tunnel opened in 1886 and the Kingsway road tunnel opened in 1971.

Once Port Sunlight's Post Office

The Queensway tunnel is not that deep, having its lowest point at only 170 feet below high water level in the river. At any one point, mid river, there is only four feet of solid rock above the tunnel.  As we were crossing, Chris remarked that there must be awful lot of water above us; I asked him keep his thoughts to himself! We paid £1.70 for the privilege of this masochistic exercise, a small price to pay for the time it saves in contrast to going the saner route upriver.

Our destination for the day was Port Sunlight, so named for the Sunlight soap produced by Lever Brothers. But there is so much more to this story and we were keen to learn the whole history.

William Hesketh Lever was born into a middle class Bolton family in 1851, the seventh of ten children and the first son, to a successful wholesale grocery supplier and his exhausted wife. (Surely she must have been exhausted with so many children?). William joined his father’s business as an apprentice, after leaving school at the age of sixteen, and learnt all about his new trade. Over the next three years he rose from cutting soap bars to travelling salesman. He sourced fresh products directly from farmers in places like Ireland and sold them to the local grocery shops in Lancashire. By the time he was twenty one, he was a partner of the business with a salary of £800 and the firm was renamed Lever & Co. Within five years Lever had established a new branch of the firm in nearby Wigan, and it was not long before the Wigan branch surpassed Bolton’s sales figures.

At thirty three, Lever was wealthy and restless; he decided to specialise in one aspect of the grocery trade – the marketing of soap. In business with his brother, James, he set up a factory in Warrington manufacturing soap, cakes of soap rather than great blocks that required cutting at the point of purchase, each individually wrapped and scented more pleasantly than those already on the market made of lard. Demand escalated and expansion demanded.

Lever settled on an area of marshy farmland criss-crossed by tidal creeks, here beside the River Mersey, just upstream from Birkenhead as a site for his new factory, wanting to combine it with decent housing for the workforce.. Although it did not invite human habitation, it allowed space for future expansion, was near a source of labour and had facilities for road, water and rail transport. And best of all, it was cheap. In July 1887, fifty six acres of land were purchased. Within a year, construction and development was underway.

Once the factory was up and running, building of the village commenced. More than thirty architects helped design Port Sunlight; no two blocks of houses were identical and most of them were designed to look like cottages. The public buildings were also impressive. Lever believed his workers should have places to meet and relax after work.

Houses of Port Sunlight

Some of those architects gained fame beyond this project. Sir Edwin Lutyens designed the crypt at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Liverpool and the Whitehall Cenotaph. Charles Tuke can be credited with the design of the Blackpool Tower, yet to be visited by yours truly. 

William Lever would have dearly loved to have pursued a career in architecture, and no doubt would have been very successful. Everything he touched seemed to succeed. He personally supervised the planning of the village and over his life, every aspect of his employee’s lives. He was a great benefactor, providing education and welfare for them and their families, modern and healthy accommodation, and offered inspiration by means of cultural activities; art, theatre, and encouraged spiritual and physical wellbeing. 

The company grew and operated until 1930 when it merged with a Dutch margarine company, Margarine Unie, to form Unilever, the first modern multi-national company.  In 1999, the commercial arm of the company divested itself of its community responsibilities, and the village came under the umbrella of the Port Sunlight Village Trust. This is funded from rent from 20% of the dwellings which are not resident-owned, from ticket sales to the museum and tours, and grants from benefactors.

William Lever himself lost his wife of thirty nine odd years in 1913. He served as a Member of Parliament between 1906 and 1909, and was created a baronet in 1911, then raised to the peerage as Baron Leverhulme in 1917, the “Hulme” being in honour of his wife whose maiden name this had been. He died in 1925 at the age of seventy three and was survived by his only son. The title carried on through another three generations until the last male heir died in 2000, the three great granddaughters not eligible to inherit such title.

The Lady Lever Art Gallery beyond the rose garden

On arrival, driving through this charming industrial garden village, we started at the Museum, a compact well curated hive of information. There we watched a short film, and read through the many interpretative panels. Then at 11.30am we joined a dozen others and spent almost two hours on a walking tour of the village, checking out the exterior of the houses, the Church today out of bounds because of a wedding happening as we arrived, the Inn, long a teetotal place of accommodation in keeping with the instruction of the very religious Lever. The hospital is now a Hotel and Spa, but has had many lives in-between, as have many of the public buildings on site. The gardens are well tended by the dozen or so gardeners on the Trust’s pay role, and the buildings remain appropriately dated, in keeping with their Grade II listing.

We lunched in the rose gardens then made our way to the Lady Lever Art Gallery, built to honour Mrs Lever and to house the compulsive collector’s hoard. There are some wonderful treasures to be found within this lovely building; in his lifetime Lever collected over 20,000 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, ceramics, textiles and ethnology. The gallery has the best collection of Wedgewood jasperware in the world, one of the best collections of 18^th century furniture in the country and its collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings are world famous.

Again we joined a tour, this time a shorter one than that about the village. The guide here in the gallery was excellent and fired my interest in parts of the collection that I would have otherwise ignored; the back stories for many of the pieces of pottery and like items brought them to life.

It was after 3.30pm that we considered our departure, but soon after exiting the village, I spotted a sign for the Port Sunlight River Park which suggested views were to be had. We threaded our way through a few streets of residences lacking the Lever touch, and past a new subdivision that on later consideration, was not well situated. The small car park had plenty of room for us, so we parked and set off on foot up the long and gentle zigzag path to the summit for the promised views.

View across the River Mersey

The 28 hectare River Park is the redeveloped closed Bromborough Dock Landfill Site which operated from 1905 to 2006. Household and commercial waste stored in twelve engineered cells lie beneath the thirty seven metre high mound, hence my concern for the placement of those new houses down the street.

From the top of the hill, there were indeed lovely views across the river to Liverpool, where we were able to clearly pick out the landmarks of the two cathedrals and the radio tower. Out to sea the haze forewarning the bad weather to come hid any ships that might have been sitting waiting for berth.

Our trip back via that sub-marine tunnel and through the late afternoon traffic was without event and we were home soon after 5pm, still no wiser regarding the progress on the repair of our vehicle.