More exam success.....

Since Autumn 2023, I have been studying for the exams to become a Blue Badge tourist guide. I am very pleased (and relieved) to announce that I have now been successful in all the exams (I took 7 - I got accreditation of prior learning for one exam as I was already a Green Badge tourist guide) and have been awarded the Blue Badge for Liverpool City Region.

What changes? I am now qualified to guide in the Liverpool City Region which includes the Wirral peninsula, Port Sunlight and the Royal Albert Dock waterfront. I can guide on walking tours, cycling tours or on a moving vehicle (usually a coach but also looking forward to being able to guide on boats in the future, especially the world famous Mersey Ferries.) I can guide in Liverpool's national museums and art galleries - for example the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight.

I have learned so much about one man in particular - William Hesketh Lever, was born in 1851 in Wood Street, Bolton, (which is about 8 miles from where I was born in Bury but well over a hundred years later...)

Soap boiler (by trade) and Prosperity Sharer (didn't want to give factory employees to think he was being over-generous,) he built Port Sunlight to manufacture soap and house his workforce. He became super successful and started a large art collection - everything from snuff bottles to the 5 metres long by 2 metres wide "Daphnephoria" painted by (Sir, President of the Royal Academy and later Lord-for-a-day) Frederic Leighton can be found at the Lady Lever art gallery in Port Sunlight village. Lever named it for his late wife Elizabeth and was a way of showing off some of his vast collection of artworks - tiny glassware to classical sculpture to new sculpture to paintings by JMW Turner, John Constable, the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and Sir David Wilkie's portrait of Queen Victoria that reportedly Victoria HATED with a passion, preventing its public display and forcing its sale - whereupon it came into the hands of William Lever and dominates the whole room that includes a John Constable and a JMW Turner as well as many by Queen Victoria favourite, William Etty - how contrary were the Victorians - cover up chair, piano & table legs as they were offensive but gaze at nude works of art no problem.

In fact, William Lever's art collection, minus the items in the Art Gallery, was auctioned off over a period of several weeks and raised £10 million for the family (about £50 million 100 years later)

If you would like to tour the Lady Lever Art Gallery with a specialist guide, do get in touch and one of our guides will get back to you.

At the time of writing this - September 2025, we have been out on the road many times in Liverpool since the first weekend in May - city & Beatles walking and coach tours, plus walking and coach tours of Port Sunlight, the galleries and museums and a few private tours for foreign visitors tracing the steps of their ancestors who were sailors calling at the port of Liverpool or made a new life for themselves in the New World - Australia, America, Canada etc.

We're working on new material for our blogs, so it might be like buses (or buzzez as I say it) - none for ages then two at once.

Looking forward to welcoming you to the Liverpool City Region sometime soon.

We really do get awarded badges!

PS - we haven't stopped guiding for the Bridgewater Canal - we can now guide the whole of it as it goes to Runcorn in the Liverpool City Region and may soon be going back into Liverpool via the Manchester Ship Canal as they are working on re-opening the locks that used to connect the two waterways and on to Duke's Dock next to the Royal Albert Dock on the waterfront.