Sunlight

For a special blip today I visited somewhere I had never previously seen, despite living within 60 miles for over half my life.

Port Sunlight was a model garden villge built from 1888 by W.H. Lever, for the workers in his soap factory not far from Birkenhead. More information can be found here.

Lever believed strongly in the welfare of his employees and so was one of the great Victorian philanthropists. The village had high quality housing for the workers, built in an ideal landscaped setting. To keep the environment neat and tidy, tenants were not allowed to cultivate their homes' front gardens, which were instead tended by Company employees. The Blip photo was my favourite, quite modest row of cottages at Lower Road, designed by architect C. H. Reilly in 1905, one of over 30 architects used to design the village.

Lever also built for the village a school, church, theatre, a pub and social rooms. One interesting fact: Ringo Starr's first appearance with the Beatles was at Hulme Hall on 18 August 1962. So you could say that Port Sunlight was the first place the "true" Beatles ever performed.

The great centrepeices of the village are its splendid war memorial and the Lady Lever Art Gallery, where today my favourite exhibit was Jacob Epstein's "Deidre."

The village was an absolute delight to visit, especially for a blipper who loves photographing buildings and places.

Two worries. One was that the architecture was all typical English rural housing, merging many traditional styles from several centuries. It could be said to idealise a rural lifestyle that never existed. But I would say that it does now exist, at Port Sunlight. It is its own, very tranquil, orderly place.

Secondly, did Lever simply create another company community where workers didnt just work for the boss but also paid him rent, bought goods in his shops and lived by his extensive, strict rules? Well it was not "just another" such place. It was not as exploitative as many less ideal arrangements in Victorian England. And the workers did seem genuinely to prosper. Another key fact: in 1909, by which date the village was mostly complete and occupied, the infant mortality rate was 70 per 1000 live births. In nearby Liverpool it was 140 per 1000.

About 250 of the village houses are owned by the Port Sunlight Village Trust. The remainder are privately owned, having been sold by Lever's successor company, Unilever in the 1980s. I didn't see a single "For Sale" sign.