The original soap star

It could so easily have started a trend – Port Palmolive, Port Camay, Port Pears, Port Lifebuoy... But it didn't, so Port Sunlight is still probably the only British village named after a bar of soap.

Getting to this carefully cherished time-warp, a Victorian "garden village" of homes fit for factory workers, is an adventure in itself. From Liverpool's Lime Street station, I take the escalator down – and down and down like a rabbit hole – to a metro train that dips under the Mersey and surfaces at Birkenhead. It snakes its 20-minute way down the Wirral, that chisel-shaped peninsula that separates Lancashire and Wales, and beyond terrace houses and tower blocks and quite a lot that's none too lovely, I get off at Port Sunlight and step into

another world.

Smart half-timbered cottages and houses – mock-Tudor, mock-Jacobean, Arts and Crafts, no two alike – line broad avenues with wide grass verges. One house is called "The Nook", but any of them could be. It looks like an immaculate corner of Home Counties North, with baronial turrets and mullioned windows, dells and glades, trim front lawns and hedges that are triumphs of topiary. And there's no mess, not a bit of litter. Mrs Miniver may at any moment emerge from a spick-and-span front door and potter off to the lending library or an afternoon at the milliner's.

This suburban Shangri-La, which has an astonishing 900 listed buildings and pulls in 300,000 visitors a year, was created by the philanthropic soap tycoon Lord Leverhulme, who made a fortune from his dazzling yellow Sunlight soap.

By the late 1880s, his business had outgrown its factory in Warrington and he needed to build a bigger one, ideally near a river to import raw materials. He settled on a tract of marshy land south of Birkenhead and, over the wall from the new factory, built a "model village" that echoes Birmingham's Bournville, York's New Earswick and Bradford's Saltaire. Where solid stone Saltaire is mainly terraces, however, Port Sunlight was designed as a spacious workers' estate of, as Leverhulme said, "semi-detached houses with gardens back and front, in which... they will learn that there is more enjoyment in life than in the mere going to and returning from work and looking forward to Saturday night to draw their wages."

With one house (now demolished) a replica of Shakespeare's birthplace, it was all very enlightened, but Leverhulme – "the original soap star" as he's billed locally – liked to have a paternalistic say in his workers' lives. He advised them to chew every mouthful of food exactly 32 times, and, because he loved birds, equipped every garden with nesting boxes. And he preferred temperance meeting houses to pubs, though these days you can have a drink at the Bridge Inn, an idealised coaching inn.

Port Sunlight (a port no longer) feels like Brigadoon, enchantingly marooned in the past. Teams of gardeners work quietly on beds of rose bushes – 10,000 of them – while the Ladies' Bowls Club turns out for a genteel couple of hours on the green. The streets are largely deserted; the afternoon dozes. Royalty once flocked to see this soapy Utopia: George V and Queen Mary, Prince Albert of the Belgians, the Crown Prince of Siam. More recently, the village was a location for Chariots of Fire and the scene of Ringo Starr's first appearance with The Beatles. Opposite the station is the Tudor Rose tearooms, with vintage red phone boxes outside and chintzy tea cosies inside. Over to the right is the Gladstone Theatre, opened by the great politician and gearing up for the Port Sunlight Players' production of The Railway Children ("Wirral Premiere") and a concert featuring the Merseyside Ukelele Band.

And beyond that is the factory, now part of Unilever. It has the grandest of offices, but the industrial buildings themselves are largely hidden. Occasionally I turn a corner and a factory chimney looms over a hedge not quite high enough to hide it, pointing up the surrealism of the place.

It's hard to believe there are really burglar alarms on the house walls. And what are these TV aerials doing here? Surely Port Sunlight's 3,000 residents cluster round the wireless every night and time-travel back to old Palm Court concerts by Max Jaffa?

Past the Village Social Tearoom (another tearoom!) is the stirring war memorial – England's second biggest, with a woman reaching out to help a wounded soldier. At the other end of a long avenue is Port Sunlight's big draw – the Lady Lever Art Gallery, which Leverhulme built in his wife's memory.

For many art lovers, this is Britain's most perfect small gallery, packed – in an airy, elegant way – with Turners and Gainsboroughs, Reynoldeses and Constables, Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat, and Millais' Bubbles, probably the most celebrated of all soap adverts. There's Wedgwood by the stockroomful, tapestries, Greek and Roman relics and a sculpture gallery where Gladstone, Wellington and Napoleon have the show stolen from them by the bust of the 91- year-old GT Goodenough, sporting the gummiest of grins. In a quiet corner is Augustus John's unflattering portrait of Leverhulme, looking like an anxious bullfrog. Not the image he wanted to cultivate, so he chopped the picture in half and stored it in a safe for years.

Downstairs is a fine Edwardian tearoom full of arty visitors, and there's yet another one across the way at the village museum – with waitresses in frilly pinnies. The museum is a fascinating place, tracing Port Sunlight's story with archive film and photographs of schoolchildren in smocks and lace collars and women workers in straw boaters. And the memories of the "Sunlighters", with their clubs including the Anti-Cigarette League. Spend 10 in the gift shop and you get a free box of – what else? – Sunlight soap.

Across the way is the church, where Lord and Lady Leverhulme's tomb is housed in a vaulted outdoor chapel worthy of an archbishop. Leverhulme clasps his hands and a smile plays on his lips. He looks rightly pleased with Port Sunlight – a job so well done that, as I take the train back to Liverpool, it's a jolt to see ordinary terrace houses again. The spell has been broken.

Port Sunlight information: 0151 644 6466, www.portsunlightvillage.com