Two signs point to Port Sunlight as you drive up the A41. The first (a blue one) sends you to the factory, the second (a brown one, indicating a cultural monument) sends you to the village and the art gallery. If all British manufacturing disappeared the map would still bear the name of a bar of soap.

It was not making the stuff but the idea of packaging it under the name 'Sunlight' that set the enterprise going. What had, up till then, been cut from a block by the grocer would be wrapped as cakes and sold as a branded product. A brand, at its simplest, combines a manufactured item and a name. The name can outlive the product. It can become generic, as 'Hoover' did, or it can establish meanings which no longer apply to the original (a Rolls-Royce is no longer, I'm told, the Rolls-Royce of cars). In Port Sunlight, art, advertising, commerce and philanthropy are intertwined.

LRB 20 January 2005 | PDF Download