Monthly Archives: March 2026

Walking round Kelham Island

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Green Lane Works gateway rear view, Kelham Island, Sheffield

There has been an island close to the centre of Sheffield since the twelfth century when the town’s corn mill was built.  The goyt carrying water to this mill left the River Don below the present-day Ball Street Bridge and ran parallel to the river until it reached Lady’s Bridge, the main river-crossing for traffic north into Yorkshire.  The land in between was known for centuries simply as “the Isle” or “the Island”, and there’s a reference to the Isle as late as 1795. 

The upstream area of the island may have acquired its name from the town armourer in the seventeenth century, Kellam Homer, who operated the Kelham Wheel by 1637.

Fairbanks’ maps of 1771 and 1795 clearly show that the surrounding area was still agricultural in the late-eighteenth century – the Duke of Norfolk’s nurseries were located at the present-day Nursery Street – but the River Don’s usefulness to industry quickly changed the townscape.  Water- and steam-powered works, along with workers’ housing, filled the area in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Not all these works were processing metal.  Another street-name, Cotton Mill Row, indicates a factory which was converted into a workhouse for six hundred inmates in 1829.  It was prone to overcrowding and repeatedly extended until it was replaced with the Firvale Workhouse (now part of the Northern General Hospital) in 1880.

The Sheffield Corporation Tramways Power Station was adjacent to the river and survives as the Kelham Island Museum, illustrating the industrial and social history of Sheffield.

Tucked away by the riverside, Kelham Island played a significant role in the city’s development, and its recent redevelopment as a desirable place to live, thrive and be entertained has drawn attention to its historic interest.

My colleague Anders Hanson gives walking tours of Kelham Island and the neighbouring area of Neepsend.  He’s a local resident and historian who knows its streets, buildings and gennels, with an engaging manner and a flair for a good story.

He links locations on his route with easily recognised personalities and aspects of Sheffield culture from the invention of Henderson’s Relish to the Arctic Monkeys and Lizzie the Elephant, as well as such upheavals as the Great Sheffield Flood (1864), the Blitz (1940) and a further flood in 2007.

Kelham Island has been dramatically redeveloped in the past twenty years.  It’s worth visiting.

Christ Church, Holloway, Derbyshire

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Christ Church, Holloway, Derbyshire

Christ Church, Holloway, halfway up a hill on the east side of the Derwent Valley near Matlock Bath, was designed by the Derby architect Percy Heylyn Currey (1864-1942) and consecrated in 1903.  It marks the tipping point between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century British architecture. 

Christ Church was sponsored by John Marsden-Smedley (1868-1959), owner of Lea Mills in the valley below Holloway, on land donated by the Nightingale family of Lea Hurst.  It was intended as the principal church in the newly established parish of Dethick, Lea and Holloway, and was completed in 1903 at a cost of £4,669.  The tower was added in 1911 in memory of William Walker of Holloway.

The design is solid and elegant in its proportion and detail, inside and out, less obviously displaying arts and crafts than the nearby Chapel of St John the Baptist, Matlock Bath, designed by Guy Dawber (1861-1938), but expressing the beauty of Arts & Craft architecture when the richness of High Victorian Gothic became softened by the desire for handcrafted, sensual designs advocated by, among others, John Ruskin (1819-1900) and William Morris (1834-1896).

Both buildings are listed Grade II*.  The Matlock Bath chapel is a gem, built on a steep slope in brick, irregular in form and embellished with exquisite fittings and furniture.  Christ Church, also on a hillside, is more solid, characterised by powerful masonry that embraces the simple spaces of nave, chancel and sanctuary.    Its decorative features stand out from a context of plain surfaces.  The reredos, font, pulpit, lectern and credence table, communion rail and pews are all designed by Percy Currey.  The organ by Andrews of Bradford was installed in 1903;  its action was modernised in 1988.

Christ Church is carefully lit by natural light from the south.  The only stained glass is the east window, a memorial to George Futvoye Marsden Smedley (1897-1916), killed in the Battle of the Somme.  It was designed by Louis Davis (1866-1941), “the last of the pre-Raphaelites”, who also did the east window of the Matlock Bath chapel. 

All the Holloway men who gave their lives in the Great War are prominently commemorated by seventeen rectangular gritstone tablets carrying incised inscriptions around the walls of the nave in gilded letters on a red background.  Photos of the seventeen individual tablets can be found at www.crichparish-ww1.co.uk/ww1webpages/christchurchplaques.html.

I visited the building with the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust and listened to a detailed account of the history of the parish and the building by the local historian Dennis Brook, who pointed out that the four successive proprietors called John Smedley inclined towards Nonconformity but were generous to Protestant congregations in the locality.  He also drew on detailed research in the John Smedley company archive to portray a vigorous community spirit that drove the church’s activities from the outset.

It’s worth seeking out Christ Church and St John the Baptist’s Chapel when they’re open.  They’re only a few miles apart, either side of Sir Richard Arkwright’s Cromford.  Christ Church is part of the United Benefice of Matlock, Dethick, Lea and Holloway.  St John the Baptist is cared for by the Friends of Friendless Churches.

Lady Lever’s art gallery

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Port Sunlight, Wirral: The Diamond and the Lady Lever Art Gallery

William Lever, the soap manufacturer and founder of Port Sunlight, was a highly successful businessman and a generous philanthropist, though some of his decisions were ill-advised.  For instance, he became enmeshed in the Belgian King Leopold II’s brutal private Congo Free State in order to secure palm-oil plantations to supply his works.

One decision he never regretted was his marriage to Elizabeth Hulme in 1874 when they were both 23.  She died in 1913, two years after her husband was made a baronet, and when he was ennobled as a baron in 1917 he took as his title Lord Leverhulme, incorporating her maiden name with his surname.  He was further elevated as Viscount Leverhulme in 1922.

Elizabeth Lever was a quiet, practical personality who gave her husband unstinting support throughout their climb to prosperity:  their son wrote that “her contribution was sympathy and understanding – an unquestioning belief in the rightness of all her husband undertook.  She never asked for any altered mode of life which might have distracted him from the work he had in hand…”  He added that “my parents used to say that they never remembered a world without each other in it”:  they had known in each other since childhood.

William Lever commemorated her by commissioning William & Segar Owen to design the Lady Lever Art Gallery (1914-22), a cleverly designed classical monumental building, filling the vista at the end of The Diamond in the centre of Port Sunlight.

It’s an imposing structure, low and solid enough to sit comfortably in the context of vernacular-style cottages and picturesque layout.  The 364-foot-long building is constructed of reinforced concrete faced with Portland stone, a choice apparently influenced by Lever’s admiration for the part-completed buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition that he visited in Chicago in 1892, and probably encouraged by his connection with Professor Charles Reilly at the Liverpool School of Architecture.

This long corridor of a building has a rotunda at each end, north and south, with a top-lit main hall flanked by a series of smaller rooms.  These include five “period” rooms, chosen by Lever to display furniture and other objets d’art:  three, ‘Tudor & Stuart’, ‘William & Mary’ and ‘Early Eighteenth Century’ are made up from historic material purchased from London dealers;  the ‘Adam’ room is pastiche, designed by Percy Mcquoid and constructed by the decorators White, Allom & Co;  the ‘Napoleon’ room was designed by Segar Owen.

William Lever frankly declared that “I am blind on music and poetry.  The whole of my artistic tastes are in colour, representing pictures, porcelain and furniture”.  He had built up a considerable collection, much of it consisting of the contents of others’ collections – three separate collections of water-colours and Chinese porcelain successively purchased from the surgeon-dentist James Orrock in 1904, 1910 and 1912, together with paintings from George McCullough in 1913, Wedgwood ware from the first Lord Tweedmouth (1820-94) and Greek and Roman antiquities originally belonging to the Regency collector Thomas Hope (1769-1831).

His choices for the Gallery reflect the taste of his time.  There are paintings by Frederic, Lord Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Sir John Everett Millais and William Etty alongside earlier artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, George Romney, John Constable and J M W Turner.  Lever’s purpose was not to reflect his own preferences, but “to cater for all tastes…for those who do not particularly admire pictures, statuary etc…”

The statuary complements the pictures, with a number of beautiful nudes which the supposedly prudish Victorians enjoyed – Lorenzo Bartolini’s Venus, Edward Onslow Ford’s Echo and Frederick William Pomeroy’s The Wood Nymph.

This is a serious collection, weighty and rich, yet even visitors with little knowledge of fine art may recognise such eyecatchers as Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat and Millais’ Bubbles, which Lever acquired with the rival soap manufacturer, Pear’s, that famously used the image in its advertising.

Ironically, the gallery also shows the Augustus John portrait, Lord Leverhulme, which its subject disliked so much he took a penknife to it:  the face was quietly kept hidden until it could be reunited with the rest of the canvas and restored in 1954 by Philip, 3rd Lord Leverhulme.

Port Sunlight

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Port Sunlight, Wirral: Fire Engine Station (2008)

The maxim “Cleanliness is next to godliness” was popularised by John Wesley in his sermon ‘On Dress’ in 1791, but it was hardly a practical possibility for ordinary people until the soap tax was abolished in 1853 and manufacturers produced inexpensive soaps for washing people, clothes and households.

One of these was William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925) who revolutionised the retailing of soap and made a vast fortune through ‘Sunlight’, the first brand to eliminate the use of silicate of soda and to reduce the proportion of tallow oil in favour of vegetable oil.

He and his brother James Darcy Lever (1854-1910) opened their Warrington factory in 1886 to produce their paper-wrapped, lemon-scented ‘Sunlight’ brand, initially with the ponderous slogan “Sunlight Self-Washer Soap:  See How This Becomes The House”

Stung by his bankers’ refusal to underwrite a new factory in Warrington, William Lever resolved to build on an unpromising marshy site at Bromborough Pool on the Wirral shore of the River Mersey advantageously located between the river and the railway.

Lever noticed that the enlightened Price’s Patent Candle Company had established a workers’ village at Bromborough Pool in 1853, and he aspired to provide his workers with the benefit of high-quality rented housing and open spaces like Edward Akroyd’s Copley (1849) and Akroyden (1859, Sir Titus Salt’s Saltaire (1859) and George & Richard Cadbury’s Bournville (1879).

The initial building-programme for what became Port Sunlight extended to approximately 56 acres, 24 of which were for the factory (completed 1889) and its associated transport links, and the other 32 were for the start of the workers’ village.  William Lever regarded his company housing as a means of “sharing prosperity”, though not sharing profits.

The Warrington architect, William Owen (1846-1910), was responsible for filling in a series of tidal inlets to create the site.  He designed many of the houses built from 1889 onwards and the public buildings which nurtured the village community.  Gladstone Hall (William Owen 1891) was initially a men’s dining room and Hulme Hall (William & Segar Owen 1900-1) was the corresponding women’s dining hall, commemorating Lady Lever’s maiden name.  The original scheme, which now forms the south-western portion of the existing village, was completed in 1897.

As a result of William Lever’s reflections during his round-the-world voyage in 1892, the site was extended to approximately 130 acres, bounded by the factory to the south, the railway to the west, the Bebington Road to the north and the New Chester Road to the east.  By 1900 over four hundred houses had been completed.  The Bridge Inn (Grayson & Ould 1900) – named after the now-buried Victoria Bridge across the filled-in creek – was built as a temperance hostelry but licensed (against William Lever’s principles, but with his consent) from 1903.

He outlined his vision for his factory village in an address to the International Housing Conference visit in 1907:

…building…ten to twelve houses to the acre is the maximum that ought to be allowed…Houses should be built a minimum of fifteen feet from the roadway…every house should have space available in the rear for [a] vegetable garden.  Open spaces for recreation should be laid out at frequent and convenient centres…A home requires a greensward and garden in front of it, just as much as a cup requires a saucer.

Lever was astute in employing a small number of regular architects – William Owen of Warrington, John Douglas of Chester and Douglas’ pupil Edward A L Ould – yet also enlisted other architects of local and national calibre for smaller commissions, including Sir Ernest George, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Professor Charles H Reilly.

Two standard housing templates were used – the Kitchen Cottage (consisting of kitchen, scullery, larder and three bedrooms) and the Parlour Cottage (an enlarged version of the Kitchen Cottage with a parlour and additional bedroom).  All had an outside WC and – unusually for the period – a bath, either covered in the scullery or in a separate ground-floor bathroom.

In 1910 an architectural competition was held to complete the layout:  it was won by Ernest Prestwich (1889-1977), then a third-year student at the Liverpool School of Architecture.  His formal scheme set out The Diamond, a wide boulevard running north-south, crossed by The Causeway, aligned on Christ Church, which had been completed in 1904.

By the time Lord Leverhulme died in 1925, 890 houses had been completed in Port Sunlight, most of them before 1911.  Some further construction took place between the wars, up to the building of Jubilee Crescent in 1938, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the factory.