Soap opera (From The Northern Echo)

Soap opera

12:10pm Saturday 13th February 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
•  

Steve Pratt discovers some of the delights of the “posh bit of Liverpool”.

ONE hundred and twenty eight, 129, and the final 130th step and I’m standing in the lamp room looking out on the Irish Sea, with the rivers Dee and Mersey on either side. The cast-iron staircase has brought me up seven floors to the top of Leasowe Lighthouse, one of the bestknown landmarks on the Wirral.

I’d always thought of the Wirral as “the posh bit of Liverpool”, something gleaned from the early days of TV soap Brookside, in which a down-on-their-luck middle class couple, the Collins, were forced to move from the Wirral to Liverpool on the other side of the Mersey.

Hopping aboard a famous ferry ’cross the Mersey wasn’t on the itinerary as our destination was the Wirral Peninsula, which offers – and I quote the tourism people – “more than 55 miles of exhilarating cycle routes, 50 miles of rural walks, 14 challenging golf courses, including Royal Liverpool, dozens of fine restaurants and 22 miles of inviting coastline”.

More than enough to fill a weekend, so why visit a lighthouse, not the most glamorous of locations, perhaps.

But Leasowe has a fascinating history.

Built in 1763, Leasowe is the oldest brick-built lighthouse in Britain and thought to be the oldest still standing in Europe.

The light was lit for the last time in July 1908 by keeper Mrs Williams, who took over the duties after her husband’s death and employed one of their 13 children as an assistant.

When the lighthouse ceased to operate, she kept it open as a teahouse for summer visitors.

After her death in 1935, the lighthouse was closed to the public and put to no further use. Now it is a visitor centre, open to tourists and schools parties, and a base for the coastal rangers. The Friends group give tours and raise money to restore the interior.

Wirral is also home to a reallife soap opera in Port Sunlight garden village, which boasts 800 grade IIlisted buildings. Here, Bolton grocer William Hesketh Lever turned a barren piece of land into a home for his soap factory workers at the end of the 19th Century.

Today, Port Sunlight is regarded as Britain’s finest example of a purpose-built workers’ village”. This green and pleasant land is still home to many, with 250 houses belonging to Port SunlightVillage Trust and the rest privately owned, having been sold by Unilever in the Eighties.

In the Lady Lever Art Gallery – opened in 1922 as a memorial to his late wife – the first Viscount Leverhulme’s passion for art is obvious in a collection that includes works by Pre- Raphaelites Millais and Rossetti.

Much of the art will be familiar to those who wallowed in BBC2’s glorious series about these artists, Desperate Romantics.

Works by Turner, Constable and Gainsborough are also exhibited, along with 18th Century furniture, Chinese ceramics and a room dedicated to Napoleonic collections.

His art collection began with Sunlight Soap paintings, bought to advertise Lever Brothers’ products and developed into a lifelong love of art. Business-wise, he was responsible for founding the world’s first multi-national corporation with factories throughout the world.

Visitors to Port Sunlight – “visit yesterday, today” – can get an idea of what life was like in a film show with actors portraying the life and times of the original Sunshine men and women. A tour takes you past the factory where today brands such as Persil, Comfort, Domestos and Surf are manufactured.

Life in Port Sunlight was good for the workers and their families. It was one of the first villages to have electricity, with the company running a domestic supply from its own power station built to serve its factories.

Among the architects who worked on Port Sunlight designs were Sir Edwin Lutyens, who counts Westminster Cathedral and the Cenotaph among his work, and Maxwell and Tuke, who created Blackpool Tower.

The houses were better than average for working-class abodes, with two types of cottage – the kitchen type and the parlour type – and bathrooms making them, according to a survey of this village experiment, “the best possible for a working man”.

A church, theatre and concert hall, library, gymnasium, swimming club and pub were all provided.

Hulme Hall – which took Lever’s wife’s maiden name – was originally a 1,500-seat women’s dining room, but later used as a military hospital in the First World War and has a place in music history as the venue where Ringo Starr made his first appearance with the Beatles in 1962.

The museum is the home of the Village Trust, which maintains the landscape, monuments and buildings in this unique piece of social and industrial history.

THE coast of the Wirral Peninsula offers the seaside resort of New Brighton, currently undergoing a £60m redevelopment, and inland there are numerous parks and open spaces. Like Birkenhead Park, opened in 1847 as a Park For The People and the first publicly-funded park in the world.

The story goes that, after visiting the park in 1850, American architect Frederick Law Olmsted incorporated many of the features in his design for New York’s Central Park.

Ness Botanic Gardens, on the bank of the Dee, was founded by Liverpool cotton broker Arthur Kilpin Bulley more than a century ago. The plant hunters he sent around the world to collect species for Ness included George Forrest. He led expeditions to China, bringing back seeds and bulbs that were distributed to botanic gardens and the public through Bulley’s new business, Bees Seeds.

His daughter, Lois, bequeathed the gardens to the University of Liverpool in 1948 to honour her father’s desire to share the gardens with the public.

TRAVEL FACTS

We stayed at Thornton Hall Hotel and Spa, a comfortable four-star hotel located in the Wirral countryside at Thornton Hough. The newly-refurbished 2AA rosette winning restaurant, The Lawns, welcomed a new executive head chef, Gordon Campbell, last year. For the second year running, it was a national finalist in the British Beauty and Spa Awards. 0515-336-3938 or thorntonhallhotel.com

PLACES TO VISIT

Port Sunlight Museum and Garden Village: 0151-644-6466/portsunlightvillage.com

Lady Lever Art Gallery: Open daily (except Dec 25,26, Jan 1), free entry.

0515-478-4136/liverpoolmuseums.org.uk

Leasowe Lighthouse: Open on the first Sunday of each month October to March, also the third Sunday from April to September.

leasowelighthouse.co.uk

Ness Gardens: Open daily (except Dec 25 and 26). nessgardens.org.uk Further details: visitwirral.com