Smithy, Neston Road and Smithy Hill Road, Thornton Hough

In the nineteenth century the village smithy of Thornton Hough stood on Thornton Common Road near the centre of the village. When W H Lever decided to build his new church here, the smithy site was purchased, Lever seemingly providing a replacement building on Neston Road on the very limit of the built-up area. The opportunity was not lost to again enhance the village. Possibly because his father, brother and sister were all residents in the village, and Lever himself lived but a short distance away, his buildings contain an additional picturesque quality when compared with Port Sunlight. This was intended to be an Arcadian landscape, a rural idyll, with cottages grouped in the shadow of his church and around the village green. Of timber frame construction on a stone base, the new smithy followed the Cheshire vernacular tradition and occupied a roughly triangular site at the junction of Neston Road and Smithy Hill. To further enhance the site, a chestnut tree (now cut down) was planted, a reference to Longfellow’s The Village Blacksmith, which begins “Under a spreading chestnut tree/ The village smithy stands:” Sadly this tree has not been replaced and the sense of enclosure which it afforded, lost.