Category Archives: Wirral

May Morris exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Wirral, until 1st November 2026

May Morris (born 1862), the daughter of well known interior decorator and artist William Morris and his wife Jane Burden, was a talented artist in her own right, initially specializing in textiles. She was also a committed socialist and a promoter of the role of women in the production of crafts. The exhibition “May Morris: Crafting a Legacy,” developed in partnership with The William Morris Society, examines her art work both during her work at Morris and Co, the interior decoration company set up by her father, and as an independent artist. It also looks at her contribution to the employment of women and the improvement of working conditions for the working class women that she employed. The exhibition runs until 1st November 2026 at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight on the Wirral.

The photographs below represent a very small sample of the total items on display. All photographs were taken with my smartphone, and are mainly of very poor quality, but should give an idea of some of the exhibition’s content. As usual there are also problems with the reflection of lighting on glass.

After a childhood spent between family homes on the Thames at Hammersmith and in rural Oxfordshire, and exposed to the ideas of her parents and their friends, at the age of 16 May Morris attended the National Art Training School in London, where she studied embroidery, a skill that she had learned from her mother and aunt. She went to work at her father’s company and i 1885 became manager of Morris and Co’s embroider workshop, a position she continued to hold after her marriage in 1890. A committed socialist, she provided opportunities for working class girls, providing training, pay and sensible working hours. The workshop mainly produced items for the home, from table cloths to wall hangings. After William Morris died in 1996 she left the company and made great progress as a freelance artist adding additional skills such as metalwork, tapestry and weaving to produce work for private commissions. She also lectured in both the UK and North America, edited and wrote a number of publications, and founded the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907, whilst also helping to organize international exhibitions. She died in 1938.

Westward Ho! designed by May Morris and embroidered by her mother Jane, early 1880s. Silks on unbleached linen.

“Decorative Needlework” as written by May Morris and published in 1993. 125 copies with this special cover were produced. Apologies for the blurred photograph.

Two designs by May Morris for Morris and Co. 1885-1890

Arcadia wallpaper. Designed by May Morris c.1886. Made with 12 woodblocks.

“Horn Poppy” design by May Morris c.1885, using one of her favourite floral motifs

Gauntlets designed by Charles de Sousy Rickets and embroidered by May Morris 1899

Dress designed and probably embroidered by May Morris c.1905

The exhibition has a mixture of May Morris’s own works and those by artists whose work is thought to have influenced her. It demonstrates the richness of her work, which certainly owes a great debt to her father’s ideas but also demonstrates her own approach to the decorative arts.

The excellent Hooton Park Hangars Aircraft Museum on the Wirral

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Comper Swift G-ACGL. The Comper Aircraft Company was based at Hooton Park in the inter-war years

With many thanks to the Heritage Open Days this year, I stumbled across this fabulous gem of an aircraft museum on the Wirral at Hooton. Hooton Park Hangars, owned and run by Hooton Park Trust, is sited on a former aerodrome, where the First World War Grade 2* aircraft hangars have been restored and two interlinked hangars now house a museum of aircraft and aircraft engines as well as other means of transport, including a military helicopter, a Chester Corporation tram, bicycles, and a number of cars, as well as model aircraft and memorabilia. There are steps leading up to the cockpits of some aircraft and in one case a ladder allows visitors to enter one of the cockpits, which gives a sense of the incredibly cramped conditions and the range of dials, levers and pedals that help to navigate the plane. Visiting information is at the end of this post. Much of the information on this post has been taken from information boards around the hangars, from volunteers who kindly chatted to me about the site, and the Hooton Park Hangars website’s history pages as well as from the sources listed at the end.

Example of some of the signage available (this for the Comper Swift shown above)

The 1788 Hooton Hall. Source: Lost Heritage

Hooton Hall was an estate owned by the Stanley family. It was built in 1788 to replace the existing house built at the end of the 15th century by the 5th Baronet Sir William Stanley, who employed architect Samuel Wyatt for the task. Seventy years later it had to be sold to pay off gambling debts and was bought by banker Richard Christopher Naylor who made various changes and added a racecourse. He moved away in 1875 when the Manchester Ship Canal was routed through the parkland, but retained ownership of the house and land. At the start of the First World War both the house and land were requisitioned by the Army, which converted the house to the hospital and built barracks on the racecourse. The house was probably in a fairly abysmal state when it was knocked down in 1932, initially remaining in the ownership of the military before it eventually came into the hands of Hooton Park Trust.

Propeller of VS390 Spitfire PR.XIX PM651, usually stationed at RAF Woodvale near Formby on Merseyside and restored by the RAF Museum at Cosford. It came to Hooton Park in April 2026.

As well as the hospital and barracks, several hangars were built on the Hooton Park site, now Grade 2* listed, originally as a plant for assembling American-built aircraft, but instead became a training centre for pilots destined for the Western Front. The hangar in which the museum is located is single storey, 16 bays in length, with iron casement windows separated by brick uprights and with corner pylons of brick (one of which was extended upwards to become a fire watch observation post). An interior arched brick arcade divides the hangar into two halves. The corrugated roofs of each half were supported by Belfast roof trusses of latticed wood which collapsed over a decade ago, but have since been replaced by new Belfast trusses. the hangars were built by Holland, Henna and Cubitt Ltd to a design by the Royal Engineers, whilst the roof trusses were built by D. Anderson and Co., Belfast. The training facility was closed in 1919 when the training facility was moved to RAF Shotwick.

In the inter-war years the aerodrome was bought by a Mr G.H. Dawson who rented space to the Liverpool and District Aero Club, which became one of the most successful in the country. At the same time, the aerodrome also became the home for two air manufacturing companies, the Comper Aircraft Co. and Popjay Air Motors. In 1927 the aerodrome was purchased to become Liverpool’s main airport, in spite of being on the Wirral before moving to Speke on the other side of the Mersey in 1930, where it remains.

Hooton Park aircraft Hangar on a chilly wet day, showing the brick elements and the 16-bay structure

At the outbreak of the Second World War Hooton Park became the base for 610 ‘County of Chester’ Squadron and in the 1940s it returned to its role assembling aircraft from the U.S. At the same time the Civilian Repair Organization was employed to inspect and overhaul existing aircraft. The aerodrome was also used during the war as an important role in aerial reconnaissance with the goal of locating submarines. In June 1946, No 610 Squadron reformed at Hooton and in 1949, 663 Squadron formed at the site. Hooton Park finally closed as an aerodrome in 1957. Subsequently Shell created a base at Hooton Park to carry out experimental work on car fuels. In 1962, Vauxhall Motors purchased the site and based their motor works at Hooton Park.

Hooton Park Hangars roof collapse HootPkTrust

Hooton Park Hangars after the roof collapse, showing the wooden lattice trusses made in Belfast. Source: Hooton Park Trust

The Hooton Park Trust was founded in 2000 to restore the hangars, originally built during the Second World War where they served the RAF Hooton airfield. This was not a lightweight project. The hangar roofs had collapsed in 2011 and just clearing the rubble cost £60,000, partly because of the asbestos used in the roofing material, which required special disposal measures. The new hangar roofs were built with modern, durable materials using the same methods as the originals. Do take the time to look upwards – the trusses are as attractive as they are impressive as you can see in the above photograph. The aircraft and other vehicles are a fine mix of different types, a mixture of civil and military, all with some connection to the aerodrome or the use of the hangars after the aerodrome had closed.

Many of the aircraft in the hangars were supplied by the Hooton Park Trust, to which aircraft have also been loaned. The Trust makes space in the museum available to the The Aeroplane Collection (TAC), first founded in 1962 so that they can both display and work on aircraft in the hangar. On a visit you are very like to see both Hooton Park Trust volunteers and TAC members working on the aircraft in the museum. In 2024 several aircraft and other items were transferred to the museum following the closure of a display hall in the Manchester Museum of Science.

G-AFIU Parker CA-4 Parasol

This is very much a living museum, with work constantly being carried out on the aircraft stored in the hangars. As well as the volunteers who were on hand to answer questions, there were plenty of engineers in overalls with their heads bent over engines, engaging in restoration work.

G-EBZM Avro 594 Avian 111A

Replica of BAPC.6 Avro Triplane

Full scale replica of a Spitfire MK IX

Gloster Meteor painted to represent aircraft WH127 of 610 Squadron based at Hooton

Another example of signage in the museum, this providing information about the Meteor shown above

Cockpit of a Fairey Gannet T.2. Steps on the other side allow you to climb up and get a good look into the cockpit.

Inside the Faery gannet T.2 cockpit

Sikorsky R-4B Hoverfly

G-ADAH DH.98A Dragon Rapide “Pioneer”

xxx

G-EBZM Avro 594 Avian 111A

G-AOUO DHC.1 Chipmunk 22

As well as aircraft and engines there are also road vehicles, including a tram, bicycles and Vauxhall cars, all of which were contemporary with some of the aircraft in the hangars or were produced after the aerodrome had gone out of use. The Shell Eco Car was a particularly surprising vehicle!

Chester No.4 tram

Visiting

The best source of visiting information is the Hooton Park Hangars website. Opening days are usually to Saturdays and the last Sunday of the month, and different activities are available on the Sundays, so do check the website to see what is going on. There are events throughout the summer, and these are worth keeping an eye out for. You can also find their social media presences on the website. There are toilets and a café on the site, although note that at the time of writing (September 2026) the café is only available on Sundays. It is very easy to find by car, although parking is limited, and on a Sunday there is a vintage bus to take you from Hooton Station. It is all on the flat, so very accessible for those with unwilling legs, and there is disabled parking. The museum closes for the season on 31st October, so you will need to get your skates on if you want to go this year.

Sources:

Much of the information on this post has been taken from information boards around the hangars, from the volunteers who kindly chatted to me about the site, and the Hooton Park Hangars website’s history pages as well as from the sources listed below.

Historic England
Northern General Service Hangar (Building 16) , Hooton Park Aerodrome
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1075377?section=official-list-entry

Lost Heritage
Hooton Hall
https://www.lostheritage.org.uk/houses/lh_cheshire_hootonhall.html

Vintage Aviation News
Discovering Hooton Park Hangars: Northwest England’s Living Aviation Heritage Museum. By Ian Doyle
https://vintageaviationnews.com/aviation-museum-news/discovering-hooton-park-hangars-northwest-englands-living-aviation-heritage-museum.html

Georgia O’Keefe, Small Wonders and three other temporary exhibitions at the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead

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I’ll start with a time alert. Very sorry for the ridiculously short notice, but if you want to see the Georgia O’Keefe exhibition, a touring exhibition from the Hayward Gallery in London’s South Bank complex you will need to take a trip to Birkenhead before the exhibition closes next Saturday, the 25th July. Make haste! The O’Keefe exhibition is part of the Small Wonders. Reimagining British Art exhibition, also curated by the Hayward Gallery, and also on until Saturday 25th. The three in-house exhibitions are The Garden As A Muse also on until the 25th, Beyond the Brotherhood: The Legacies of the Pre-Raphaelites, on until 7th November, and Echoes of the Floating World on until 6th February 2027. All the exhibitions are free of charge and all are very well worth visiting.

If a Georgia O’Keefe exhibition comes to a local gallery it is a matter for celebration, and the Memories of Drawing exhibition offers 21 small pieces drawn by O’Keefe between 1915 and 1963 and prepared for publication with her agent and friend Doris Bry. Photogravures are images created by a sophisticated and highly accurate printing process. They are a complete delight, like fabulous little sound-bites, and it is wonderful to see them all together in one room. O’Keefe is best known for large, delicately rendered paintings and drawings of flowers, seashells, animal skulls and desert landscapes, which are so inherently vital and dramatic that they often appear to be in the process of metamorphosing into something much less easy to define. The photogravures display the concentrated essence of O’Keefe’s work, containing all the gorgeous draughtsmanship, the organic, the semi-abstract and sometimes wholly abstract, and each one is all the more fascinating for being so small and minimalist. All but two are in graded shades and textures of black and grey, and all share the sense that at any second they might shape-shift in tiny, imperceptible ways.

Georgia O’Keefe’s Drawing No.9 (1915)

O’Keefe’s work is always dynamic and frequently seems to be alive; the photogravures capture that beautifully. The depth of O’Keefe’s dedication to the development of her artwork is demonstrated by “Blue Lines” (1916) of which she commented “It was in the fall of 1915 that I decided not to use any colour until I couldn’t get along without it and I believe it was June before I needed blue.” Her humour comes across vividly in “Drawing No.9” (1915 – shown right) about which she said “Well, I had the headache, why not do something with it?” From the barely-present representation of a seashell, “Drawing No.40” (1934) to the spiky, stark lines of a New York skyline “The City – New York Rooftops” (1930s), she is able, with real elegance and understated drama, to convey the complexity of both natural and unnatural worlds. My photos do absolutely no justice to the detail and texture in each image. You just need to see them for yourself. The exhibition is a treat – don’t miss it!

As if Georgia O’Keefe on her own was not enough, there is another visiting exhibition and three temporary mini-exhibitions drawn from the Williamson’s own collections.

The Echoes of the Floating World exhibition, in one room focused on Ukiyo-e was a particularly lovely surprise. As the Williamson website says, “[t]heir motifs of flat perspectives, high vantage points, and bold colour distinctions, were a radical influence across European art” and the premise of the exhibition is to show the 19th century woodblock works juxtaposed against artworks that were influenced by the Japanese art. It was interesting to see the more modern artworks, with the surprising range of ways in which composition, colour and subject-matter were adopted and transformed.

Of course the real stars were the Japanese works, with some very contrasting pieces chosen for the display. From almost monochrome examples, to highly coloured pieces, the exhibition managed, in a confined space, to give a very good sense of range of the style and expression produced by the woodblock artists. The oldest example of Ukiyo-e in the Williamson’s collections is a lovely depiction of a man and woman coloured only in mid-blue and black, dating to before the wider palette of colours became available. Images in full colour included rich and vibrant pigments, which complemented scenes that were full of motion and narrative intensity, as well as those that captured intimate moments of everyday life in subtle and delicate shades. A lot of people, right now in all this California-type weather, will relate to the splendid row of ladies with their parasols standing on a bridge over a river to help them cool down.

The Garden As a Muse exhibition “traces how artists across time have interpreted gardens not merely as physical spaces, but as symbols of creativity and solace. From delicate, nostalgic studies to immersive and grand paintings, these pieces reveal how gardens can function both as sanctuaries and laboratories of artistic experimentation.” As a thoroughly committed gardener I very much enjoyed this insight into different perceptions of what gardens can or should be. Sentiment was unsurprisingly present, but there was a thorough mix of styles and there were some very unexpected pieces too. I was particularly amused to find myself staring at Tolstoy who seemed improbably relaxed, although very dour. The two Arthur Lee textile designs, produced at their Birkenhead factory and mapped out with precision on graph paper were fascinating to see, ready to be converted into tapestry, embroidery and even printed fabrics. Sian Martin’s fabric-based abstract representations of such contrasting horticultural arrangements as seed beds and vegetable patches were incredibly effective. The entire ensemble of images was both witty and engaging, and nicely drew attention to the British fascination with garden places.

The Beyond the Brotherhood: The Legacies of the Pre-Raphaelites exhibition presents some of the original works produced by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood but also introduces some of their followers, who built on their legacy to create works of their own in the same broad style. This included examples from the so-called Liverpool School of landscape painters as well as elaborate pieces by the sculptors of Birkenhead’s Della Robbia Pottery Company, some locally produced stained glass, and it was delightful to find some William de Morgan tiles on display.

The Small Wonders exhibition was the most difficult to describe, mainly because I found so little about it relatable, which is unusual for me. It is a travelling exhibition curated by London’s Hayward Gallery, and brings together work by fifty artists, to provide a snapshot of British art over the last 45 years. I have been visiting and enjoying modern and contemporary art for decades, but although there are always some pieces that leave me cold, I found this was more frustrating than usual. Before I go on, I should say that I may be alone in my response to what is clearly a popular exhibtion.

One piece, which for me was engaging thought-provoking, was a video with a voice-over, but the rest were all static, framed artworks, although most of the artists, according to their biographical data, work in various forms of media including including 3-D installations and cinematic work. Perhaps the artists are better understood in other media but for me most of the artworks failed to engage me either emotionally or intellectually. I could see that there is technical skill and creativity, and found some of it visually attractive, but a lot of it was very derivative of previous styles and although the multicultural mix was a positive element, I found none of it deeply gripping. Apart from Saskia Olde Wolber’s video artwork “Centrifuge,” which was compelling for both its narrative and its constantly evolving organic semi-abstract imagery, there was nothing with sufficient depth for me to sink my teeth into, and I came away longing to have had a teachable moment, something from which I could have learned, or which had at the very least moved me to empathy, laughter, annoyance or simple admiration. But of course, to each their own. Having said all of that, I am sincerely grateful for being given the chance to see a London exhibition without having to travel to London to do it.

The Williamson is a splendid resource to have for the Wirral and so near to Chester. I very much admire their policy of retaining part of the museum for their permanent collection and the other, larger part for temporary exhibitions. It means that local people can always expect to come in and find something new to see, whilst those of us driving from elsewhere find that the trip is more worthwhile when there are new artworks to see from the Williamson’s own stores. You can find out more about the Williamson’s events on their web pages. I signed up for their newsletter after my first visit and that is an excellent prompt not to miss anything. You can sign up for it at the end of every page.

On my previous post about the Williamson’s permanent and temporary collections I mentioned the café. It is comfortable and spacious, with excellent coffee and some good-looking lunches being produced in large numbers, and as you imbibe you can enjoy more art because the walls of the café are used as additional hanging space for art works, and these too had changed since our last visit. And don’t forget to visit the model ships, which are stunning. Who wouldn’t want to cross the Mersey on a ridiculously curvaceous Art Deco ferry like this one? Bliss.

Because of that big yellow sun and the vast acres of blue sky, we opted for The Harp Inn at Ness, parking at Denhall Quay, both of which I posted about last week, and here too there was much loveliness to be enjoyed across the acres of green marshes reaching towards the Welsh foothills and Moel Fammau, with a fabulous breeze coming off the estuary. We were both ravenous, so ordered one haddock and chips with garden peas and one cheese and ham ploughman’s (the latter, mine, was absolutely huge and truly heavenly). It was a really super way to round off a superbly satisfying morning.

The lovely Harp Inn and the chunky remains of Ness Colliery’s Denhall Quay, south Wirral

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The Harp Inn, Little Neston

One of the most mellow, blue-skied and sunny afternoons that I have enjoyed in a long time was a sublimely relaxed and chatty visit to The Harp Inn on the Dee estuary, just outside Little Neston. It is a super little pub dating to the 1700s with lovely views over the marshes towards the impressively long line of the Welsh foothills. The pub’s official opening time is 12 noon, but we arrived to find it open at 1145 because due to queues outside their doors at 12 they are currently opening at 11. Very gratifying! The beers and ciders change from time to time (just check their website), there are plenty of soft drinks on offer and the lunches that were being paraded past us as the afternoon advanced looked gorgeous. The staff are lovely, and the atmosphere is great. There are lots of tables perched on the grassland at the edge of the lush green estuary, and on a stiflingly hot day, a wonderfully warm but cooling breeze came off the Dee to make the peaceful, endless vistas a delectable place to linger, interrupted only by birdsong. The breeze was so perfect. I do love the heat, but it is lovely to be able to sit in the sunshine without dripping like a tap. Update: We went back the following week to have lunch after a visit to the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Birkenhead, and the food (haddock, chunky chips, tartare sauce and garden peas for one of us and an enormous ham and cheese ploughman’s with all the trimmings and more for the other) was just as good as it had looked as it was passing us on trays the previous week.

Most of the photos taken on my aged iPhone. Enlarge at your own risk!

View from The Harp

Denhall Quay

According to the pub’s website, the building has stood there since the 1750s, when it was originally built as three coal-miners’ cottages, before being converted to an inn in 1780 to serve the expanding coal-mining community at Ness. This segues nicely into the second major benefit of the pub, which is its location a stone’s throw from Denhall Quay, an intriguing and picturesque line of wall, made of massive red sandstone blocks, that stretches out into the marshland, and is clearly the remaining echo of a substantial structure. In fact, the wall is what remains of a long pier that served the Ness Colliery, built in 1839 to replace an earlier quay in the same location. The wall was much deeper than it is now, its lower tiers lying beneath 200 years of silt accumulation, but it it sufficient to give an idea of how impressive the structure originally was.

This was not the most obvious location for a quay because the river did not run past the colliery, veering towards Wales just before Little Neston, meaning that a channel had to be created to link the quay to the main river, which became known as the Colliery Gutter. It was not ideal, as vessels often had to wait for two tides to turn before being able to navigate all the way to the quay, forcing colliers to beach on the muds in the interval between tides.

Denhall Quay c.1839 showing the quay, with its distinctive shape, surrounded by subterranean tunnels. Source: Annakin-Smith “The Neston Collieries, 1759-1855” 2019, p.170, fig.10.6

There were two collieries at Ness: Ness Colliery, which opened in 1759, and Little Neston Colliery immediately to the north, which opened in 1820. Most people, myself included, would not automatically associate coal mining with the Wirral, although it is a very familiar industry from North Wales. Fortunately, Anthony Annakin-Smith wrote an excellent book on the subject in 2019, which I read shortly after its publication, and he gave a really enjoyable lecture about the collieries at the Festival of Ideas this year (July 2026). The Wirral coal seams are an extension of the Welsh ones, but although a slither of the seams can be found on the Wirral landmass itself, most of them lie under the estuary, and it was here that most of the mining took place. A whole network of tunnels was built below the estuary, and subterranean canals were added to help remove the coal in long narrow vessels called “starvationers.” Both the tunnels and the canals lead back to shafts where the coal was hoisted to the surface. It was a dangerous and sometimes tragic business. Once extracted and processed the coal was transported to ports in Britain, Ireland, France, Spain and as far away as America and even Barbados.

A “starvationer” of the sort used in the canals beneath the Dee estuary, now in the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port (my photo)

The two collieries were located either side of a border dividing land between two different family interests. The original colliery, Ness, owned by the Stanley family, handled the arrival of the new colliery very badly, and its owner, Sir Thomas Stanley, who sounds like an absolute monster of a man, pursued a course of aggression that eventually, on several occasions, erupted into blatant sabotage, including destruction of machinery, flooding of their rival’s tunnels and, on one particularly violent occasion, an attempt to use explosives to completely obliterate the opposition. The collieries were both closed between 1845 and 1855 due to silting of the estuary, but they were revived in 1875, and the last coal was worked in 1927.

It is difficult to assess just how the collieries initially impacted local people, because most of the coal miners were brought in from North Wales and Lancashire, with Wirral residents only working in minor and administrative roles. But both the collieries and the miners became part of the community, and Denhall Quay is an important reminder of the unexpected industrial and social heritage of this small corner of the Wirral.

The Harp Inn, on Quayside in Little Neston, is at the end of a residential lane, Marshlands Road, turning left along the Quayside, before it eventually becomes a track and then a footpath. There are three main parking areas, first just as you round the bend to turn left from Marshlands Road onto Quayside (What3Words ///regarding.solving.mirroring, about a two minute walk, heading in the same direction), then at the pub itself where there is parking for about 10 cars (What3Words ///when.grumbling.kicks), and finally at Denhall Quay (///bike.outcasts.tarred, about a two minute walk back to the pub).

If you are interested in finding out more about the Wirral collieries I sincerely recommend Anthony Annakin-Smith’s The Neston Collieries, 1759–1855: An Industrial Revolution in Rural Cheshire published by the University of Chester Press (a second edition was released in 2023), and also check out his website at https://www.nestoncollieries.org.

At the entrance to Denhall Quay there are two helpful information boards that are faded but still just about legible, covering the earlier and later colliery phases, and you can walk out into the marshland along well-worn paths (dry in a hot summer, but probably not as foot-friendly in the autumn and winter).

Both the pub and the quay are on the King Charles III England Coast Path, and would make a great destination if you are visiting either Ness Botanic Gardens or the RSPB reserve at Burton Mere.

Other posts on this blog re the southwest Wirral area:

The verdant Hampston’s Well, Burton village, Wirral

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I must have driven past Hampston’s Well several times without noticing it, although when I mentioned an earlier visit to the RSPB Burton Mere, a friend mentioned that there was a well somewhere in the Burton village area. I was not quite sure what to expect when I remembered it on the way to Ness Gardens, and tapped it into the SatNav. On a sunny day, the light filtered through the dense woodland leaves, creating an enchanting dappled effect.

The well is a natural spring now in a stone container with a wooden lid that is easily removed. From here it trickles elegantly down a channel into a big pool, surrounded by radiating lines of block paving. The well has been restored by the Friends of Hampston’s Well, who also maintain it. It is on the south side of Station Road, where there is parking for around two to three cars. The What3Words location is: ///professes.outsmart.deflate.

A flight of steps leads down from the road level, at the top of which there is a bench, some very faded information posters in a noticeboard display, and two prone sandstone columns with plaques containing information about the well.

According to an entry on Facebook (but otherwise unverified) a dedication document for the well in 1975 stated that the sandstone columns are cores from the sinking of another well nearby. Here are the plaques:

There is some more information on the OldWirral.net website, with some photos of how it looked before restoration.

Late June at Ness Botanic Garden on the Wirral

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On one of those days last week when I had a list of a hundred other things I ought to have been doing, and when the sun was blasting down from the heavens like an impending judgement, I jumped in the car and went to Ness Botanic Gardens on the Wirral. Even on a seriously hot day, there was a breeze coming up off the Dee estuary, there were plenty of shaded and wooded areas to enjoy, and Ness is notable for the sheer quantity of seating and benches available throughout. I was there for three hours, so taking water was essential, but if you forget to bring any with you, the shop is well stocked with bottled water.

My previous visit, during rhododendron and azalea season, was only six weeks ago, but the change was absolute. The brightly coloured floral effusions of shrubberies, woodland edges and wending pathways had gone over for the season, but in their place both sun- and shade-loving extravaganzas had emerged and were doing a fabulous job of ornamenting large areas of the gardens. Water features are a significant aspect of Ness, and even though drought conditions were in play, the ponds and wending channels were looking good, supporting numerous water-adapted plant species, some of them with leaves as large as parasols, as well as dragonflies and damson flies. The herbaceous borders in the big open expanse below the main building are being re-done and were not the extravaganza of colour I had been expecting, and the rose border had gone over, but what I learned on this visit is how much there is to see beyond the core areas. The gardens extend into shaded wooded areas with winding trails and great views over the Dee and the north Wales coast, and there are extensive wildflower meadows.

There is plenty of parking. Visitors are provided with a map of the site with the entrance ticket. Ness has a nice, well attended café which does excellent coffee and a good range of sandwiches, hot food and cold drinks, with both indoors and outside tables available. There is a small plant sales centre outside the shop, with excellent quality plants that are kept well-watered (mine are doing well in their new homes), and a shop indoors selling gifts. The Ness Botanic Gardens website with full visitor details is here.

Available to download from the Ness Gardens website at https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/nessbotanicgardens/Ness;,Map,3_2_26.pdf, but I have not found a way of rendering it easy to print. You are given a copy, however, with your ticket

For a very enjoyable day out, this could be combined very easily with the RSPB Burton Mere nature reserve, which is just 10 minutes away.

Brunel’s magnificent “Great Eastern” arriving this day in New York from Liverpool in 1860: The Illustrated London News

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On 17th June 1860 the fabulous S.S Great Eastern left Liverpool and set sail on her maiden voyage for New York. She arrived there this day, 28th June. Her designer and architect was Isambard Kingdom Brunel whose pet name for the ship during construction was “Great Babe.”

There is a nice nod to Great Eastern on the Chester City Walls, where the length of the ship (692ft) was carved quite deeply into one of the coping stones at Kaleyard, near the pigeon coop, preceded by an engraved anchor. It is also the measurement between that point and the King Charles Tower, also known as the Phoenix Tower. You can see a photograph of it at the end of this post.

I have written previously about the Great Eastern and her relationship with the Mersey, and above is a splendid engraving from the 21st July 1860 Supplement of the Illustrated London News showing her June arrival in New York.

Great Eastern shortly before launch 1858

Great Eastern shortly before launch in 1858 by Robert Howlett. Source: Wikimedia

With a capacity for 4000 passengers, she left Liverpool on her maiden voyage with only 35 passengers and 8 company overseers, both of which were far exceeded by a crew of 418. She was equipped to run under sail or steam, via paddles or propeller, had four decks, and could carry 15,000 tons of coal. Sadly she was never given the opportunity to meet the long-distance goals of India, China and Australia intended for her by Brunel and her builders and investors and was never competitive on the busy cross-Atlantic passenger service to which she was initially confined.

The fortunes of Brunel’s astonishing S.S. Great Eastern swung between greatness and near-disaster like an enormous, record-breaking pendulum. She was all too often something of a gigantic white elephant, but she became an invaluable resource for laying cables across the Atlantic, and was always a great public attraction.

Great Eastern at Hearts Content Cable Station

Painting by Charles James Lewis of the Atlantic Telegraph Expedition landing of the cable in Hearts Content Cable Station in Newfoundland, Canada, on July 27 1866, which he witnessed. Source: PK Porthcurno

After a traumatic roller-coaster of a career, the enormous ship was sold to be broken up in 1889, the work to take place on the Mersey.

Great Eastern, beached in advance of being broken up on the Mersey in late 1888, Wirral side. Source: Liverpool Echo

Throughout her history, Great Eastern was the subject of curiosity and fascination, and people lined up to buy souvenir pieces of the ship before the breaking work began on 1st January 1889. The photograph above shows her beached on the Mersey, ready to be broken up, and she continued to challenge even after the breaking work began. Not only was it a very sad episode for posterity but also, as it turned out, for the ship breaker. The company directors had estimated that it would take 200 men to break up the ship in a year, but she was so well built that it took nearly two years, requiring the costs of ongoing labour and additional machinery, including much more substantial wrecking balls, to finish the job. Substantial profits had been anticipated from her scrap value, but she was broken up at a considerable loss. Brunel had built her to last.

One of Robert Howlett’s famous photographs of Brunel with Great Eastern in 1857 prior to launch. Source: Wikimedia

Brunel had died in 1859 whilst the ship was still undergoing sea trials and had suffered an engineering accident during which five stokers died, and although the consensus is that the emotional stress of the ship’s construction and the difficulties of her launch undoubtedly contributed to his death, he was already suffering from a debilitating kidney disease.

It is perhaps thankful that he did not live to witness this drawn-out demise of his grandly imagined, fabulously realized and much-loved “Great Babe.”

Great Eastern was such a colossal, record-breaking chunk of maritime, industrial and national heritage that I find it more than slightly difficult to forgive the universe for allowing her to be broken up.

Infographic comparing ship sizes, in chronological order from left to right. Click to expand. Source: JF Ptak Science Books.

The length of Great Eastern carved into the City walls in the 19th century. Source: Geograph. By John Turner, CC BY-SA 2.0

The watercolour of Great Eastern, shows her beached on the Wirral side of the Mersey for repairs, although the painting is very sadly not on display. It was painted three years after the illustration at the top of the post, in 1863, by William Gawin Herdman (1805-1882).

Great Eastern watercolour showing the ship on the gridiron for repairs just off the Wirral on the Mersey in 1863. By W.G. Herdman (in the collection of the Williamson Art Gallery, not currently on display). Source: Williamson Art Gallery Collection at Birkenhead.

Cooling walks at RSPB Burton Mere on a seethingly hot day

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My third visit to the RSPB nature reserve at Burton Mere on the southwest Wirral was made particularly remarkable by the unprecedented and indeed record-breaking levels of heat in late June. Thankfully, Burton Mere offers an excellent balance of sunny board walks and leafy pathways and tracks, as well as cool hides, and there was a slight breeze from the Dee even where other areas locally were perfectly still. The reed beds and woodland walks were delightful on such a hot day, and there were two different types of wild orchid in flower, which were something of a treat. There were plenty of birds to see cooling down in the water, with the furthest hide, Border Hide, as busy with a wide range of wading birds as it had been on both my earlier visits. Apologies for the wildfowl photographs, which are at the absolute limit of the range of my camera lens. A full daily list of what has been spotted is always posted on the RSPB Burton Mere’s Facebook page to give an idea of what to look out for. I was particularly glad to see the avocets with their upward-curving beaks and distinctive black and white plumage. Avocets had become extinct as residential breeding birds in Britain prior to their reintroduction in 1947. According to the RSPB website, over half of those breeding in the UK today are still on managed wetland reserves. There were plenty of them at Burton Mere this week.

There were only a few other human visitors, and when I paused at the welcoming café on my way out, for a delicious latte and an ice cream at an outside table in the shade, I was in splendid isolation, accompanied only by a small jackdaw, which eyed my ice cream with all the optimism of one who is regularly fed by visitors. The heat has clearly deterred many visitors, but it was easy enough to avoid extensive periods of exposure to the sun. Because of the heat, taking water is a strongly recommended precaution, but if you forget to take your own the café sells bottled water as well as other cold drinks.

Visiting details can be found on the RSPB Burton Mere website here. If combined with the Ness Botanic Gardens, only 10 minutes away, this could make a good day out. Both have cafés for lunches and other refreshments, and both have plenty of parking.

My previous post about RSPB Burton Mere, with much better photographs of the bird life, is on the blog here.

Bee orchid

Southern marsh orchid

View across the marshes to Burton Point, where the purported hillfort is located on the RSPB land (look out for the sign posts)

My somewhat shaky video of the view from the Border Hide at Burton Mere, taken on my camera balanced on one of the Border Hide window sills. I love the cacophony of bird calls (just under 2 minutes long).

A delightful and colourful visit to Ness Botanic Gardens on the Wirral

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Following his purchase of land in Ness in 1898, Arthur Kilpin Bulley, the son of a wealthy Liverpool cotton importer, created Bees Ltd, a nursery specializing in exotic seed and plant imports, at the same time financing planned collection expeditions to far off destinations like the Himalayas and China. He died in 1942, and in 1898 his daughter gifted the garden to the University of Liverpool. The University continues to manage the gardens, now totally 64 acres, with areas of rockery, woodland, water gardens, specimen lawns, an orchard, a small greenhouse with succulents, a laburnum and wisteria arch, and of course there are lovely views over the Dee estuary to north Wales.

Ness Botanic Gardens are open from March to October. When I went with my friend Katie yesterday it was with the hope of seeing a lot of rhododendrons and azaleas as well as the laburnum and wisteria arch, and we were in luck. It was overcast but dry, and the floral extravaganza brought delicious colour and light into the otherwise rather dull day.

There is plenty of parking. Visitors are provided with a map of the site with the entrance ticket. My battered copy is shown right (click to enlarge). I did look to see if there was a printer-friendly copy to download on the Ness Gardens website, but I couldn’t find one. There is a different style of map, but it all on a green background and not printer-friendly. The Gardens has a nice cafe which does excellent coffee and a good range of sandwiches, hot food and cold drinks, and both indoors and outside tables are available. There is a small plant sales centre outside, and a shop indoors selling gifts.

William Hesketh Lever’s Port Sunlight Village – industry, architectural diversity and social responsibility

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Port Sunlight. Source: Unilever Archives

It is quite a story. When William Hesketh Lever purchased land for a new factory and decided to build a village for the workers and their families in 1888, he wanted it to be a place where people would enjoy living, to be a thing of beauty, to offer educational and leisure facilities, and to celebrate the best of both vernacular and formal British architecture. Port Sunlight is often referred to as a model village, but this implies something rather effete, a bit of a vanity project, whereas the village was intended to offer all the benefits of a real, thriving, supportive community, as well as an educational and cultural hub. Port Sunlight was to be the very antithesis of the slum housing and overcrowding that had crushed so many workers in industrial areas and enterprises of the northwest.

View down a section of the Dell, once an inlet of the Mersey

To ensure that there was real architectural diversity, over 30 architects were employed. Central roads were based on boulevards. All streets were wide and the houses, all with a minimum of two bedrooms, were fronted with lawns. As it grew during the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were open green areas, a formal garden based around an old inlet of the Mersey now called the Dell, cricket lawns, a bowling green, tennis courts, a theatre, an open-air swimming pool (ingeniously heated with surplus heat from the soap factory), schools, a church, a cottage hospital, a private fire brigade, a village shop and various improving societies and clubs, including a girls’ institute. There were even plenty of allotments. To top it off, a library was built with a small display area to share a changing selection of Lever’s ever-expanding collection of antiques and antiquities, which were eventually moved into a custom-made art gallery within the village, which still attracts hundreds of visitors a year. Lever believed in prosperity sharing. Instead of profit sharing, in which additional cash is put into pay packets, he shared the prosperity of the company by using it to maintain the village and continue expansion and to add improvements to living conditions. The benefits to villagers came with risk, as anyone not caring for their home, or who fell short of Lever’s high moral standards could be ousted from their homes. His attitude to the village and his workers has been termed paternalistic. Today the village is managed and cared for by the Port Sunlight Village Trust, an independent charitable trust set up by Unilever in 1999.

William Hesketh Lever. Source: Wikipedia

William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925) was born in Bolton, the son of a grocer. Although he and his younger brother James went into business together, providing the company with the name Lever Brothers, it was William who had the innovative flair that made the company a household name. His commercial successes earned him the title baronet in 1911, after which he was Lord Lever and baron in 1917, becoming Lord Leverhulme (combining his own surname with that of his late wife). In 1922, following the death of his wife in 1913, he was further honoured with the hereditary rank of Viscount. He named his village after his best-selling product, the subject of his genius for branding and marketing, Sunlight soap. The soap factory and related buildings sat behind the long low frontage of office buildings, which eventually became the Lever Brothers headquarters, on the very edge of the village. It was featured in the Illustrated London News in 1898, clearly the focus of considerable wonder. Today, with its beautiful homes, its art gallery, its community hall, its green spaces and formal flower beds, and even its more recent garden centre, it really merits the term oasis, sitting between a busy, industrial and commercial part of the Wirral built around the A41, and the Chester-Liverpool railway line.

Hulme Hall

I was incredibly lucky to live in Port Sunlight for six months in the early 1990s, but apart from an enjoyable foray into the Lady Lever Art Gallery last year, had not had a wander around the village since moving back up to the area a few years ago. It was huge fun to visit the Wirral History Festival on 21st March 2026. It was a bright and sunny day, and the turnout was enormous. There was a vintage double decker bus doing tours of the village, and the gorgeous 1901 Hulme Hall that hosted the event (originally built as a ladies / girls’ dining hall and named after Lever’s wife and designed by William and Segar Owen) was filled with a vast swathe of stalls. Entry to the Festival was free of charge but it inevitably ended up costing me a small fortune in purchases of books and journals 🙂 After its stint as a dining hall, and a temporary display area for Lever’s art collection, Hulme Hall housed Dutch and Belgian refugees in the First World War, later becoming a military hospital, and went on to be used by the American army in the Second World War. According to the Unilever Archives booklet the Beatles played there in 1962 and for the last few decades it has been it has been used for various community events.

Interior of Hulme Hall with the Wirral History Festival in full flow

The History Festival’s village tour bus doing the rounds near the Lady Lever art gallery

The subsequent walk around the beautifully maintained village, looking fabulous against blue skies and busy with visitors, was delightful. Today the village, within a 130 acre estate, is home to more than 900 Grade II listed buildings. It is impossible to do full justice to them here so I have picked out a few buildings to talk about, and have added snapshots of several others to give a sense of the village and its splendid character. Although the buildings looked great in the sunshine, many of the photographs simply didn’t work, even with the help of Photoshop either because I was shooting straight into the sun or because buildings were in deep shade, and there are some notable omissions. Hopefully I will take those on another visit. See the tourist map at the end of this post for some of the more prominent buildings.

As the image at the top of the post shows so clearly, Port Sunlight was a story of two distinct parts: the factory buildings that were focused on the production of soap, and the village that housed the workers and their families. The long low brick frontage of the office buildings along Wood Street served as something of a liminal area between the splendid village and the industrial buildings, including the soap factory, accessed via Central Road beyond the gates. The original main entrance to the offices of Lever House, with its 1895 ornamental stone façade by William and Segar Owen, and the Royal coat of arms above is still in situ, proudly welcoming visitors to Lever Brothers. Lever Brothers amalgamated with Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie in 1929, becoming Unilever, today one of the world’s biggest multinationals. Unilever Merseyside Ltd (UML) was based in the same Wood Street offices well into the 1990s.

Part of Central Road, Port Sunlight, leading past the office buildings and through the gates into the factory zone

Houses on Wood Street, opposite the entrance to the factory area

Houses on Wood Street, nearly opposite the entrance to the factory area. By Douglas and Fordham, 1894

Decorative detail on the above building

Community buildings were of fundamental importance to the development of the village. Next to the large 1902-04 Gothic Revival church designed by William and Segar Owen is the splendid Church Drive School designed by Grayson and Ould. Dating to 1902-03, it was built to supplement the Park Road Schools in the building now known as the Lyceum, eventually replacing it. The Lyceum, particularly enterprising and imaginative, was built 1894-96 and sits next to the Dell and its attractive bridge. Designed by Douglas and Fordham it was enlarged in 1898 and had the capacity for 350 boys and girls and 150 infants. It became a Lever Brothers training facility in 1917, eventually becoming the Unilever Archives between 1904 and 2006. Today it serves as a community space, and also hosts an interactive exhibition about the production of soap.

The Lyceum

Church Drive School

The Bridge Inn

The Bridge Inn intrigued me because Lever’s family were Congregational and were dedicated teetotallers. According to the guide to the village produced by Unilever, it was built in 1900, having been designed by Grayson and Ould who also designed the rather more adventurous Church Drive School. It was named for the 1897 Victoria Bridge, since demolished: “It was originally opened as a temperance hotel with dining and tea rooms and a few guest bedrooms but, in 1903, a deputation of villagers requested that a licence be applied for. Lever had to agree to a referendum and over 80% voted in favour of a licensed public house!”

The Classically-inspired Lady Lever Art Gallery was not part of Lord Lever’s original vision for the village but having filled his several homes to capacity, and finding the display areas of Port Sunlight’s library and other public buildings insufficient, he decided to build a gallery so that he could properly share his collections with the general public. He was one of the first British industrialist to create a gallery for his personal collections, although it was a practice very much in vogue in America, where he had visited with his wife and son.

Turner, Joseph Mallord William; The Falls of the Clyde; Lady Lever Art Gallery. Source: Art UK

The art gallery was named in the memory of his wife Elizabeth née Hulme who had died in 1913 before Lever became Lord Leverhulme. Work began on the museum in 1914, with George V in attendance, and was opened in 1922 by Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter Princess Beatrice. The items on display, from all periods of history and many different countries, were selected by Lever personally and included works purchased specially to cater for broader tastes than his own, as well as art that he commissioned. When he died in 1926, a substantial proportion of Lever’s private collections was sold at auction, but the items in the Lady Lever represent some of the the best of his years of collecting. The museum was handed to the nation in 1986. I visited last year, and posted about that visit here.

There is a huge mixture of housing styles and types in the village, some of them based on actual historical buildings, the others designed specially for Port Sunlight.

Cross Street, by Grayson and Ould 1896

On the corner of Lower Road and Central Road, by Lomax Simpson 1906

Central Road

Church Drive, by Grayson and Ould 1900-02

Park Road. The first set at far left were by William Owen, 1892-4

Detail of the above picture

Wood Street by Grayson and Ould, 1895

Greendale Road by William and Segar Owen, 1894

Park Street, by Douglas and Fordham 1895

Lower Road, by C.H. Reilly, 1906

Bath Street, by Talbot 1895-97

3-9 Bridge Street by Douglas and Fordham

Wood Street

Primrose Hill by Jonathan Simpson, 1899

Port Sunlight’s alternative sun dial

The war memorial is one of the unifying components of the village. Built between 1919 and 1921, and designed by Sir William Goscombe John, a friend of Lever’s, its theme was defence of the home. Inside the memorial is a copy of a book containing names of Port Sunlight residents and Lever Brothers employees worldwide who served in the forces during the First World War.

The War Memorial

The empty boating pond in front of the Lady Lever was not added until the 1930s. In spite of several attempts to restore it to its former glory, the original construction of the pond, which used to include a fountain with a statue, was not sufficiently robust to survive the best part of a century, and solutions are now being sought to implement a long term repair to enable the pond to be re-filled and the statue and its fountain to be restored to their original positions.

The successful garden centre is on the site of the open air swimming pool near Port Sunlight railway station and the Gladstone Theatre, and is a rather good use of the space. I daresay that Lord Leverhulme would have approved of something that combined commercial enterprise with a product that would bring pleasure in both the village and neighbouring areas.

The bowling green with Hulme hall in the background

One of the two bowling greens, with Hulme hall in the background, Cross Street on the right and the 1890 William Owen buildings on Bolton Road to the left

The Queen's visit to Port Sunlight in 1988 during a visit to celebrate the village's 100th birthday, with the then Managing Director of UML.

The Queen’s visit to Port Sunlight in 1988 during a visit to celebrate the village’s 100th birthday, with the then Managing Director of Unilever Merseyside Ltd (UML).

Sources:

Books

Hubbard, Edward and Michael Shippobottom 2019 (third edition). A Guide to Port Sunlight Village. Liverpool University Press

MacQueen, A. 2004. The King of Sunlight. How William Lever Cleaned Up the World. Corgi.

Websites

Based in Churton
Lord Leverhulme’s multifarious collections at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral
https://wp.me/pcZwQK-70x

An Institutional History of Internal Communications in the UK
Domestos and Domestics: The Family Metaphor at Lever Brothers. By Joe Chick, August 2023
https://historyofinternalcomms.org/internal-communication-unilever-family/

National Museums Liverpool
Lady Lever Art Gallery
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/lady-lever-art-gallery

Port Sunlight Village Trust
Home page
https://portsunlightvillage.com/
About Us
https://portsunlightvillage.com/about-us/
Renewing the Boating Pond
https://portsunlightvillage.com/renewing-the-boating-pond-project/
Racism, the Belgian Congo, and William Lever. Second edition, June 2022
https://portsunlightvillage.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/PSVT-Racism-the-Belgian-Congo-and-William-Lever-Booklet-July-2022.pdf