Port Sunlight & its Church

This month I called at the Port Sunlight ‘model village’, an idealised English residential area built by the community-minded soap manufacturer, Viscount Leverhulme, from the end of the nineteenth century. Very much influenced by the then popular Arts and Crafts style, the houses are spacious and attractive, not like those occupied by most members of the working class, which were poky terraces with little or no decorative features. The roads are wide and there are beautiful examples of public art set amidst the trees and rose gardens; there are stylish fountains and even an art gallery. And in this model village which lacked a licenced public house, there is a very prominent place of Christian worship: Christ Church.

Lord Leverhulme was a Congregationalist like ourselves, though his model church was nondenominational, at least to begin with. It resembles a typical Anglican building with its perpendicular gothic architecture and prominent altar, though its first minister was a Wesleyan, and it is now part of the United Reformed Church, or URC. Quite why a thick, gothic style was employed I cannot tell. Like the residential architecture, there might have been a dewy-eyed nostalgia for the past at play, when religious squabbles did not exist and the community all attended the same religious premises. Curiously, the current URC minister is photographed in a clerical collar, a hooded white alb and a stole, which is as Anglican as it gets; he certainly matches his building.

I like Port Sunlight. I like its feel, I like its raison d'être, I like its location. Yet there is a something sentimental and backward-looking about it. The church building is an idealised part of this design, even though it is, in my humble opinion, of an inappropriate and unnecessarily archaic style. The ideal human life is not to merely have a large private house and a well-paid job, but to be a part of a community. And that community should worship and glorify God, rather than to glorify itself and offer worship to idols. This, Lord Leverhulme well understood. Model villages and towns today might lack churches and have nothing but community centres and pubs, but the good, communal life is also the spiritual life, the godly life, the sanctified life, the Christian life.