Sunlight and Submarines

Leverhulme Hotel desk light

Port Sunlight

The damage caused by Liberators to U534

So minimalist is the décor in the Leverhulme hotel, that there is no provision for tea and coffee making in the bedrooms. I really do not want my privacy invaded by room service, especially not at 5.30am. So I forgo the offered £25 breakfast and enjoy some water and a Marks and Sparks sandwich. The glamorous life of a travel writer!

A couple of hours after rising, I collect my newspaper and my freshly polished shoes from outside the bedroom door.

Despite my window being wide open all night, the room is still baking hot. After abluting, I rearrange the table lights, replacing the hideous, supposedly art deco, lamp on the desk. Call me pernickety, but the telephone handset is not charged, the electronic calendar says it’s the 19^th January, the Airwick electric air freshener is empty, there’s candle wax all over the bathroom floor and the hotel web site isn’t working. Oh, and the wifi password in the room folder is wrong.

Attention to detail? Clearly lacking.

A couple of minutes walk away is the Port Sunlight Museum (www.portsunlightvillage.com). There I get a really good introduction to the Port Sunlight village, founded by Lord Leverhulme for his Sunlight soap factory workers in 1888. Some of the exhibits are charming including the revelation that the prize in the allotment competition was two tons of manure! I also learn that Unilever was former after Lever Brothers merged with the Dutch Margarine Union.

I am met by the splendidly knowledgeable and enthusiastic Maureen, who takes me round this 900-home estate, nearly all of which are Grade 2 listed. Just as in the original concept, all the front gardens are maintained by a Trust, which was set up in 1999. So, even though around 75% of the properties are now privately owned, the front gardens are never part of the deal.

This of course gives the village, built in squares amid large swathes of green space, an uniquely tranquil feel. Unilever still operates from the next-door factory, but almost nobody in the village now works there.

Lord Leverhulme built a school, church, sports facilities and much more. The cottage hospital was built in 1907, some 41 years before the formation of the National Health Service.

While the men were given a splendid building for their bowls club, the ladies had to push for their own facility. The little wooden hut is still in regular use.

The impressive Hulme Hall, formerly used to feed 1500 hot meals a day to single women workers, is now a venue for weddings.

Ten minutes along the line is Birkenhead, where, forty years ago, my ship was in refit at Cammel Laird’s, where there is now a business park. The adjacent Woodside Ferry Terminal has a new £5M display of one of only four remaining WW2 German U Boats. U534, whose sister I have seen at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, was bombed by Liberators and discovered in the silt of the Kattegat near Denmark. Paul, who started life at the owners, Mersey Ferries, by tying up boats, gives me a great introduction. I look in awe at the damage caused by the depth charges dropped by the aircraft.

The silt preserved a fascinating time-capsule of life on board, including gramophone records, uniforms, playing cards and cigarettes, all of which are on display.

I’ll confess I wasn’t sure what I’d think of a submarine, which has been sliced up like a giant sausage, but it really works. You get a fascinating insight into what U-Boats were like and the exhibition (www.u-boatstory.co.uk) is quite splendid.

The ten-minute trip across the Mersey reminds me just how much it looks like Shanghai waterfront (or should it be the other way round?). Nearing completion is the futuristic Museum of Liverpool, due to open next year.

I wish all train operators looked after their first class customers like Virgin Trains. They really go the extra mile to win business. There’s a nice lounge at Liverpool Line Street and I hugely enjoy the journey to London on the tilting Pendolino, with a slick service of endless hot and cold drinks as well as tasty snacks and fresh fruit.

In two hours, the Pendolino travels 195 miles; my journey to Norwich takes the same time to go just 115. With not even a free plastic cup of tea in sight.

Museum of Liverpool

First Class in a Virgin Trains Pendolino