Replacing an earlier building at the very edge of the old Viking town, Sunlight Chambers (‘chambers’ is a rather archaic word meaning ‘offices’) was erected in 1901 as the headquarters for the Irish operations of Lever Brothers, the English soap and detergent manufacturers. “Sunlight” was the company’s brand name for their then main soap product, hence the origin of the name of their Irish offices. In 1930 when it merged with a Dutch company, the company changed its name to Unilever.
At the turn of the 19th and into the 20th century, personal hygiene was still rudimentary if not altogether absent for a significant number of people. Only the privileged had a bath in their homes. A single water tap serving the whole house was commonplace. Toilets may have been just crude facilities in the backyard. Showers or washing machines were unheard of. It was even considered by some folk that to wash oneself frequently was only to expose your skin to outside germs.
To promote the cleansing application of soap a series of twelve ceramic panels and four roundels were commissioned for the three facades of the building depicting colourful figures in relief carrying out certain duties in the pursuit of cleanliness. The top seven panels show people working in the fields, the forest, delivering coal, constructing an arch, ploughing and fishing. In other words, vocations that resulted in getting your clothes dirty and smelly! The lower panels provide the solution to all the mess. The friezes here demonstrate the extraction of raw materials, the manufacture of soap, merchants bargaining for scents and oils and cleaning or laundry women scrubbing clothes alongside a river and removing wicker baskets of washed laundry.
