The grand facades of Dodington House were paid for with sugar — and the labour of enslaved people. The Codrington family's Caribbean wealth began in the 1630s when the first Christopher Codrington sailed to Barbados. By 1674, the family had acquired Betty's Hope, an 870-acre sugar plantation in Antigua worked by nearly 400 enslaved Africans brought from Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. Two Codringtons served as Governor General of the Leeward Islands between 1689 and 1704.
In 1685, the family leased the entire island of Barbuda from the English Crown for the annual rent of 'one fat pig per year if asked'. They used Barbuda as a supply island for their Antiguan plantations, shipping timber, livestock, and enslaved people between the two. By the early 1800s, Barbuda held 314 enslaved individuals alongside thousands of sheep and cattle.
Back in Gloucestershire, the sugar revenues funded the transformation of Dodington. The Codrington who commissioned James Wyatt's new house built it without borrowing, paying from plantation income as it arrived. When slavery was abolished in 1834, Sir Christopher Bethell-Codrington received compensation of over six thousand pounds for 492 enslaved people — a sum worth roughly three-quarters of a million pounds today. The town of Codrington on Barbuda still bears the family name.
“Back in Gloucestershire, the sugar revenues funded the transformation of Dodington.”
The contrast between the elegance of Dodington Park and the brutality that funded it is a story repeated across many English country houses. The Codringtons held the estate until 1980. It was purchased in 2003 by the inventor James Dyson.
