Human Flower Project

Port Sunlight: By the Mersey

Before hope, there was uncertainty. And after Modernism, there were more modest ideas of the modern. John Levett looks at the houses and gardens that Lever Brothers built.

Essay and photos by John Levett

There is an evocative photograph by Edward Hardman called ‘The Birth of the Ark Royal.’ The Ark Royal was an aircraft carrier built in the immediate post-World-War-II years to maintain, it was asserted, Britain’s status as a major player befitting its history ancient and modern. The photograph, taken in 1950, shows a young boy outfitted for morning school, walking down the middle of a street in Birkenhead with the massive bulk of the hull below a forest of gantry cranes in the distance. (I can imagine the lad arriving back home and getting down to building a similar crane in Meccano. Building anything in Meccano was completely absorbing; taking anything apart to build the next something was the downside. There was a Meccano exhibition at our local Museum of Technology last year.You couldn’t move for old blokes.)

‘The Birth of the Ark Royal’ by Edward Hardman

The reason for the photograph’s iconic status is that it captures promise and uncertainty. A war ended and another about to begin. A new decade begun and a young life growing into it. The only other image that matches it is the final scene of Humphrey Jennings’s 1945 film ‘A Diary For Timothy,’ picturing a gang of young lads running through a bomb site, metaphorically running into a future. Hardman’s photograph appears in David Kynaston’s ‘Austerity Britain 1945-51,’ the first volume of his history of post-war Britain. It fits that moment perfectly: out of ashes into a hope.

There are no shipyards building carriers these days in Birkenhead but the container traffic still docks there, the Mersey ferry arrives and departs every half-hour, people look for work but there’s little promise in that. Promise has never been far away. In New Brighton, on the tip of the entrance to Liverpool Bay, a grand resort was once planned; a tower to rival Eiffel’s built; the railway stationed there. The inter-war slump did for it. Port Sunlight did better.

These islands are dotted with the utopian experiment; some on a grand, expansive scale others sunk beneath undergrowth and forest invasions; some only in remembrance, others in current commercial health. Industrialism didn’t create it but it sure gave it a punt upfield.

The idea of creating a community from scratch according to visions, hopes, expectations, detailed planning, enlightened spatial awareness, appreciation of health, welfare and work always sounds worthy. It’s the model for the advertising for the latest corporate ‘village,’ suburban ‘hamlet,’ dormitory ‘community,’ kibbutz, New Harmony, Oneida Community, Cabet’s Icarians, Levittown. It was also a way out of a state not fully understood, a way into something human-sized, humanised.

Port Sunlight was built on the Wirral, close to a railway line and on the banks of the Mersey. It was built between 1889 and the Great War by William Lever, soap-maker, and designed to be a complete community for the work force of Lever Brother: housing, schooling, churches, medical centre, swimming pool, concert hall, bowling green, cricket pitch, art gallery.

Thirty architects were employed to design unique blocks; each block is different, each front garden not. The residents, all employees of Lever Brothers, had the back garden to themselves and the allotments for the community but the front gardens were tended by Lever Brothers gardeners for a small charge. It’s still a small charge—£1 per year.

It’s not difficult to raise an eyebrow at the idea of what was essentially a company village & all that implies—the rules, the restrictions, the enforced (officially or peer-pressured) behaviours; the sanctioned culture and the created brother & sister-hood. No unions and no strikes; no shop-stewards and no work to rule. No football in the streets (I’m guessing) and no dogs running around in them either. Robert Owen, creator of New Lanark, recognised in his last years that for all the improvements he’d instituted in the working lives of his labourers, he was still the boss and still wielded all the power preserved in bossing. The drudgery of the labour, the working conditions & the living within them were ameliorated, but the system that created them hadn’t disappeared. But …

If I were a labourer on Merseyside having just come out of the Great Depression of the late nineteenth century and looking for work then, working for Lever Brothers would do for me. Forget the rules and regulations, company benevolence would suit me just fine. Anyone working for Lever Bros in those years must have felt blessed. The mind-numbing, hourly-paid work was still there; the industrial accidents and the environmental pollution hadn’t disappeared; the precariousness of the trade cycle still hung around but nothing in memory compared to living in Port Sunlight I’ll bet.

The garden suburb movement always looked back towards something that was believed to have existed in some time that often-bad poets wrote often badly about. It’s what distinguishes it from Modernism. For modernists, the future always dwelt in that which had yet to be invented, and invented was what it had to be; nothing in the past could speak to what might be in a future to be created. Look at the sketches of Sant’Elia and Taut to get the idea. Modernists knew that nothing stayed the same. ‘All that is solid, melts into air.’ Marx knew that and so too did Baudelaire and Balzac; Goethe probably did, too.

But the building of new worlds oft comes unstuck. I recently visited ‘Picasso: Peace and Freedom’ which surveyed Picasso’s work after he joined the French Communist Party in 1944. It’s a mess (work not exhibition). When I first got to know Picasso’s art in the early ‘60s, I could only see him through the history Modernism. I was, of course, totally wrong. Apart from his (Braque-inspired?) cubist moment, he continued the tradition of Spanish history painting and Spanish momento mori.

In the same way I used to see the garden city/suburb movement within the early history of Modernism. Again wrong, but I might blame Nikolaus Pevsner for that. They’re an outpouring of a very British middle-class sensibility and as such could only have emerged when they did, with the emergence of a recognisable modern (not Modernist) middle-class. British suburbians wanted what the working-class of Port Sunlight had but with the security of ownership and the security of the garden hedge which they could clip themselves.

At the end of an afternoon I bought a cream tea with fresh strawberries in the tea rooms & then sat beside the bowling green and asked myself if I could live here. I’d hate it. Thirty architects and a multiplicity of designs and an overwhelming feeling of middle-class smugness. So what keeps me looking out for garden suburbs?

It’s about the ‘moment’ of the garden city/suburb idea. The late-nineteenth century moment of a sensibility that took to seeking ways out of the mess of exploitation and scarring that industrialism had brought forth and the alienation from decency that accompanied it. William Morris was its most energetic and passionate soldier and his writings still resound. He was a lousy propagandist but he carried a picture in his head of all that wasn’t ‘shoddy.’

‘Shoddy’ rules now. I missed the ferry back across the bay so took the train, bought a massive bag of chips and walked through Liverpool 1 (so called). I could be walking through Birmingham, Newcastle or Sheffield and not know the difference—something the Sunlighters wouldn’t know about. I finished the chips off by the pier. I thought of Irish immigrants coming into Liverpool Bay during the 1840s & ‘50s and guessed this side of the Mersey held the same promise of a new moment.

A voice from behind: “Scuse me mate. Have you got a light?” I always hate to disappoint but did. “I’ll have a chip instead then!”

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