Secret stories of our best loved buildings NO 4
A WORKERS’ VILLAGE OF
ARCHITECTURAL SPLENDOUR Port Sunlight village and museum, King George’s Drive, Bebington, Wirral CH62 5DX
Less than half an hour from Liverpool’s Lime Street Station, on a train bound for the ancient Roman city of Chester, is the picture-postcard village of Port Sunlight in the Wirral, Merseyside.
You’d be forgiven for mistaking Port Sunlight for some semi-rural getaway for the wealthy, such is the architectural splendour of its hundreds of cottages. The village is, in fact, a vital part of British working-class history, and a remarkable testament to the labour of hundreds, if not thousands, of craftsmen – the forebears of our fellow building workers today.
Port Sunlight was the brainchild of Victorian industrialist William Hesketh Lever. He and his brother owned the rapidly expanding Lever Bros. soap company, then based in Warrington.
The soap works there was too small for the company’s expanding production and so Lever sought to build a new factory elsewhere.
Ever the forward thinker, Lever also wanted to build quality housing for his workforce. The model industrial village, where companies provided housing for their workers, wasn’t a totally new idea – New Lanark in Scotland, Saltaire near Bradford, and Bromborough Pool Village were important precursors to Port Sunlight.
But what truly sets Port Sunlight apart from these other model industrial villages is the emphasis on quality and aesthetics. In Port Sunlight, no two cottages are the same. Work on Port Sunlight began in 1888. The village was so named after Sunlight soap, Lever Bros.’ most popular product.
36 unite buildingWORKER Spring 2026
At a celebration banquet in Liverpool in 1888, Lever laid out his vision, announcing his intention to “build houses in which our work-people will be able to live and be comfortable – semi-detached houses, with gardens back and front, in which they will be able to know more about the science of life than they can in a backstreet slum, and in which they will learn that there is more enjoyment in life than in the mere going to and returning from work.”
Lever employed 29 architectural firms to design the cottages and other public buildings. Some of the most celebrated architects of the day were involved in Port Sunlight, including many from the North West region: William Owen, John Douglas, and Edward Ould. Although not well-known at the time, Edwin Lutyens was also involved in designing
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