Soap opera

Following yesterday's fashion bonanza I decided to stay with the theme and went to see an exhibition called 'The Finishing Touch: Women's Accessories 1830 - 1940' at the Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am not a dedicated follower of fashion and have never knowingly been described as stylish so I had to laugh when I read the following quote from a top 19th century fashion journal:

'Mittens - these are not now fashionably worn, either for dinner wear or at any time, though elderly ladies and people who do not regard fashion sometimes wear them'.

The Queen, The Lady's Newspaper, 1877

Needless to say, I was wearing mittens as I stood there reading those words! I think that says it all really...

A 'No photography' rule was being strictly enforced in the gallery so here's a picture taken just outside the building.

Port Sunlight village, dating from the 1880s, was the brainchild of William Hesketh Lever, and was built as a 'model village' to house the workers at Lever Brother's 'Sunlight Soap' factory (now Unilever).

The village consisted of 900 houses, allotments, a cottage hospital, schools, a concert hall, open air swimming pool, church and temperance hotel as well as the Lady Lever Gallery which houses some of the Levers' extensive collection of artworks, including many great Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The whole village is now a conservation area.

Lever was certainly a great philanthropist and introduced schemes for eduction, welfare and entertainment for his workforce but, whilst there can be no doubt that the villagers were in many ways far better off than the majority of their contemporaries, the model of philanthropy which he adopted was incredibly paternalistic. A 'nanny state' in miniature. Lever 'knew what was best' for his workers and they were expected to toe his line. I find all of this very interesting in relation to current government efforts to promote 'the Big Society', private enterprise and philanthropy at the same time as putting the boot into the public sector and decimating the voluntary and community sector...

The 1930 Lever Memorial, shown here, includes four figures at the base, representing Industry, Art (with her back to the camera!), Charity and Education.