Let the Sunshine in - Port Sunlight (17/8)

In my early days of studying Industrial Chemistry I heard about William Lever setting up to make soap, and how he used the profits to really look after his workers and lead the way for others like the Cadbury family to do likewise.

Different housing styles (for the UK!)

The key to it was that his factory was so successful that he and his brother had to look for a new site in which they could expand. In 1888, they acquired 56 acres of marshy farmland beside the Mersey, but with easy access to road and rail, at a cheap price, and then proceeded to build a village as well as force authorities to add another railway station so that he could attract all the workers he needed (he wasn't a softy!). It was helped by the fact that he had a keen interest in architecture, particularly domestic architecture. Over the initial building phase he used 28 architects to each design a block of houses with his principles in mind. Initially he wanted to build in many different styles representing the countries he had visited, but this proved too costly. Between 1888 and 1914, over 800 houses had been built which had homed over 3,500 people.

Services, gardens, and today cars at the back only

All of the houses have lawns and gardens facing onto the street, from where none of the backyards can be seen. Each house has an allotment in the rear in which the tenants were encouraged to grow fruit and vegetables. The sizes of the houses vary, and were allotted on the basis of status within the company, but they were not segregated so that a workers often found themselves living next to one of the top managers. Indeed Lever himself lived in one of the houses for quite some time.

Bowling green with hall in which Ringo
first played with the Beatles opposite

The village was self-contained, with a cottage hospital, schools, a concert hall (where Ringo Starr first played with the rest of the Beatles – a concert our guide had witnessed), an open air swimming pool (now the plant nursery), churches, and a temperance hotel for his travelling staff. There were clubs for the boys and girls. Lever introduced welfare schemes, and provided for the education and entertainment of his workforce by encouraging recreation (we watched some people playing crown bowls – quite interesting to compare it to lawn bowls) and organisations which promoted art, literature, science and music. He wanted his employees to be better money managers and to have their money paid into a savings account, so he asked a local bank to open up a branch in one of the buildings. He was also a keen art collector and built an art gallery dedicated to his late wife to house some of his collection for the workers to enjoy (and us for an hour or so until we went to join a tour of the village).

Memorial to the 700 Sunlight workers who joined the army
 when WWI was declared.  Art gallery in the background.
Photo taken from near memorial to the victims of Hillsborough

All tenants of the houses were employees of Unilever up until the 1980's, when houses were first offered for private sale, initially to residents. Approximately one third of the houses still belong to the estate and no ex-Unilever employee of the site will be turned away. There is a covenant on the houses in that no changes can be made to the exterior of the building, and there are no traffic lights at any of the street corners. The streets themselves are far wider than most English villages.

It is an amazing social experiment which appears to have worked.