Our recent trip to Liverpool was one of those family trips where the individual parts ended up fitting together rather better than I had expected. On paper, it was a couple of nights in a hostel, some museums, a day trip to Port Sunlight and a few walks around the docks. In practice, it became a journey through several different kinds of history: the history the children are learning at school, Liverpool’s maritime and industrial past, William Lever’s ideas about work and society, and even a small piece of my own working life.
It began, appropriately enough, with the train.
We were travelling to Liverpool on Sunday morning and unexpectedly managed to get there about an hour earlier than planned. A delayed earlier service appeared, we got on it, and it then skipped Sheffield, which somehow left us with a bonus hour in Liverpool.
Rather than waste it, we headed to the World Museum.
With only an hour, there was no chance of doing it properly, so ours was very much a whistle-stop tour. The World Museum is an extraordinary mixture: Ancient Egypt, natural history, dinosaurs, cultures from around the world, an aquarium and space. We raced around getting a flavour of it rather than attempting to absorb everything.
It was quite a good accidental beginning to the trip. Within an hour or so of arriving in Liverpool we had gone from Egyptian mummies and dinosaurs to astronomy and the natural world.
From there we walked down towards the waterfront and the Museum of Liverpool.
If the World Museum is about everywhere else, the Museum of Liverpool is very firmly about Liverpool itself: the docks, transport, industry, communities, music, football and the lives of ordinary people.
The parts about Liverpool as a great port were particularly relevant to what we were going to see over the next few days. There are reminders everywhere of just how much of the city’s identity was created by ships, docks and international trade.
One of my main reasons for choosing Liverpool for the trip was my 13-year-old daughter’s history lessons. She has been studying the transatlantic slave trade, and I had hoped that we could visit the International Slavery Museum while we were there.
Unfortunately, it was closed.
That was a genuine disappointment, because Liverpool is one of the most important places in Britain for understanding that history. The city’s extraordinary wealth and global importance cannot be separated from its involvement in the slave trade.
We had at least begun to see the wider story at the Museum of Liverpool: the port, international trade, migration and Liverpool’s connections with the rest of the world. But the more difficult part of that story would have to wait.
Afterwards we attempted to buy food for the next couple of days, although Sunday opening hours made this slightly more complicated than expected. Then we checked into the hostel.
That evening was much less ambitious: food in the hostel restaurant, some colouring, and then a walk along the waterfront.
And that was where another piece of history unexpectedly appeared.
Moored at the Royal Albert Dock was the Nao Santa María, a full-size replica of Christopher Columbus’s flagship from the 1492 voyage.
It is an impressive thing to see simply as a ship: timber hull, masts and rigging, looking extraordinarily small when you think about the Atlantic crossing associated with it.
But its presence in Liverpool also made it more thought-provoking.
Columbus’s voyage sits near the beginning of the story of European expansion into the Americas: exploration, certainly, but also colonisation, exploitation and the destruction of Indigenous societies. Eventually that Atlantic world became intimately connected with the slave trade.
So although we had been unable to visit the slavery museum that afternoon, we ended the day standing beside a physical recreation of a ship connected with the beginning of a much larger historical story that my daughter has been studying.
That wasn’t something I had planned.
Port Sunlight
Monday was the part of the trip I had planned most carefully.
We took the train out of Liverpool to Port Sunlight, the village created by William Lever from the late 1880s for workers at his Lever Brothers soap factory.
I’d become interested in Port Sunlight not simply because the buildings are attractive, but because of Lever’s ideas about what life for industrial workers ought to be.
In an 1888 speech, he talked about his hope of building comfortable semi-detached houses with gardens where workers could learn more about what he called the “science of life”.
The line that particularly stayed with me was his belief that people should discover:
“there is more enjoyment in life than the mere going to and returning from work, and looking forward to Saturday night to draw their wages.”
That is a remarkably powerful idea.
But Lever’s thinking ran deeper than simple benevolence. He had been given a copy of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help at age sixteen, and it shaped the way he thought about work and human life. Smiles’s 1859 book was all about character, perseverance and self-improvement—the notion that people could better themselves through effort and opportunity. Lever believed that employment alone wasn’t enough. Instead, the path should be: work leads to self-improvement, which leads to improved home and surroundings, which leads to cultivated interests and, ultimately, a fuller life.
That philosophy shaped what Port Sunlight became. Lever was saying that people should have decent houses, gardens, cleanliness, recreation, culture and things to enjoy beyond simply working until the next payday. These weren’t mere comforts. They were meant to be the conditions in which people could develop themselves, become more educated and capable, and live more thoughtfully.
Port Sunlight was his attempt to turn some of those ideas into bricks, streets and gardens.
We began in the recreated worker’s cottage beside the museum. This was probably one of the best places to start because it reduced all those big ideas to something very ordinary: what did a family’s home actually look like?
Instead of simply reading about improved workers’ housing, we could walk through the rooms: parlour, bedrooms and scullery and imagine people actually living there.
Then we joined the guided walking tour.
This was excellent.
Walking around with somebody explaining the village makes it much easier to understand that Port Sunlight isn’t simply a collection of pretty old houses.
The variety is deliberate. Rather than endless identical terraces, different architects created houses in different styles. There are gardens, open spaces, halls, churches, recreational buildings and public art.
The environment itself was part of the experiment.
After the tour we went back into Port Sunlight Museum for a more detailed look at Lever Brothers, Sunlight Soap, the factory, the village and the people who lived there.
There is a tension in the story that I found interesting.
Port Sunlight was undoubtedly progressive in many ways. Compared with overcrowded industrial housing elsewhere, the houses, gardens, sanitation and amenities represented a huge improvement.
But it was also paternalistic.
Lever wasn’t simply giving workers better houses and leaving them alone. He had strong ideas about what constituted a worthwhile life and about how people should spend their time. The front gardens, for instance, were company-owned, which meant workers couldn’t put up washing lines or arrange them as they wished; they had to stay neat and respectable, performative spaces reflecting the company’s values. Recreation was encouraged, but through organized activities that Lever had chosen. And perhaps most significantly, when you left your job at Lever Brothers, you left your house behind. Unless you’d worked long enough to retire, you had no claim on the place you’d lived in.
When your employer is also responsible for your housing, recreation and much of the environment around you, that gives the employer an enormous amount of influence. The paternalism was well-intentioned but it was still paternalism.
That makes Port Sunlight more interesting than either a simple story of Victorian benevolence or a simple story of industrial control. It was both idealistic and complicated.
After all that thinking, we did something rather more practical and found lunch in the village pub.
Then we headed to the Lady Lever Art Gallery.
This is another extraordinary part of Port Sunlight. Lever didn’t apparently think that providing workers with decent houses was the end of the matter. He also believed that beauty, art and culture should form part of life.
The gallery, which he created in memory of his wife Elizabeth, contains his remarkable art collection.
It is a strange and rather wonderful contrast: a major art collection sitting in the middle of a village built around a soap factory.
By that point we had encountered Port Sunlight in several different ways. We had been inside a worker’s home, walked its streets with a guide, explored the museum and then looked at Lever’s art collection.
But my favourite moment came towards the end.
We walked over towards the surviving Unilever complex.
Many years ago, for a short period, I worked in the IT department there as a consultant. We looked through the reception area and I was able to point out to the children roughly where I had once sat.
It was a tiny piece of personal history compared with everything else we had been looking at, but that was exactly why I liked it.
We had spent most of the day talking about William Lever, Lever Brothers, workers and the development of Port Sunlight from the 1880s onwards.
Then, at the end of it, there was my own very small connection with the same company.
After that we took the train back into Liverpool, bought some pasta, cooked dinner at the hostel, did some more colouring and went for another evening walk.
One of the things I increasingly like about travelling with the children is this mixture. A trip doesn’t have to consist of one attraction after another. Museums and history can sit perfectly happily alongside supermarket trips, cooking pasta, sitting around colouring and going for a walk before bed.
Walking through Liverpool’s history
Tuesday morning was quieter.
We didn’t have time for another big museum because we needed to catch our train home and get back in time for my daughter’s dance rehearsal.
Instead, we went for one final walk along the waterfront.
In some ways, this turned out to be the perfect ending.
On Sunday we had been inside museums learning about Liverpool. On Tuesday we walked through the physical remains of the history we had been reading about.
Around the Albert Dock and Pier Head are layers upon layers of Liverpool’s maritime past: warehouses, docks, shipping offices, memorials and civic buildings.
We passed reminders of the great ocean liners and the merchant navy, and the Three Graces, the Royal Liver Building, Cunard Building and Port of Liverpool Building still dominate the waterfront.
There are traces of darker histories too.
Liverpool’s prosperity grew from global commerce, but some of that commerce was built directly upon slavery and colonialism. Warehouses, merchants, shipping companies and grand buildings cannot be understood entirely separately from the networks of trade that paid for them.
We passed the area of the International Slavery Museum we had hoped to visit, as well as reminders that Liverpool ships were taking part in the transatlantic slave trade from the end of the seventeenth century.
Further along were memorials to sailors and ships, including the connections with Titanic and Lusitania.
Liverpool was never simply one maritime story. There were emigrants leaving Europe, merchant sailors travelling the world, wealthy shipowners, dock workers, naval warfare, ocean liners, colonial trade and enslaved people all connected in different ways through the same port.
Then we turned inland, passing buildings connected with Liverpool’s commercial history before making our way back towards the station.
And that was that.
We caught our train and returned to ordinary life.
Some suggested walks from the YHA