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, with his brother James Darcy Lever (1854-1910), 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.