William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme - Legacy

Legacy

Lever was a major benefactor to his native town, Bolton, where he was made a Freeman of the County Borough in 1902. He bought Hall i' th' Wood, one time home of Samuel Crompton and restored it as a museum for the town. He donated 360 acres (1.5 km2) of land and landscaped Lever Park in Rivington in 1902. Lever was responsible for the formation of Bolton School after re-endowing Bolton Grammar School and Bolton High School for Girls in 1913. He donated the land for Bolton's largest park, Leverhulme Park in 1914.

Leverhulme endowed a school of tropical medicine at Liverpool University, gifted Lancaster House in London to the British nation and endowed the Leverhulme Trust set up to provide funding for publications of education and research. The garden of his former London residence 'The Hill' in Hampstead, designed by Thomas Mawson is open to the public and has been renamed Inverforth House.

He built many houses in Thornton Hough which became a model village comparable to Port Sunlight and in 1906 built Saint Georges United Reformed Church. The Lady Lever Art Gallery, opened 1922 and is in the Port Sunlight conservation area. In 1915 Lever acquired a painting entitled "Suspense" by Charles Burton Barber (an artist who came to resent 'manufacturing pictures for the market'). The painting was previously owned by his competitor, A & F Pears, who used paintings such as "Bubbles" by John Everett Millais to promote its products. Much of Leverhulme's art collection is displayed in the gallery which houses one of the finest formed by an industrialist in England.

A.N. Wilson from the Mail Online, January 2010, remarked, "The altruism of Leverhulme or the Cadbury family are in sad contrast to the antisocial attitude of modern business magnates, who think only of profit and the shareholder."