Driving up the west coast, from Bridge-town to Speightstown, you soon see why people around here call this the Platinum Coast. It’s not just the colour of the coral sand — it’s the colour of the foreign money. These seafront lots sell for millions, prices few Bajans can afford. Yet once you head inland you encounter another country, a land of chattel houses and plantation houses — remnants of the twin trades that shaped this island, slaves and sugar.
Built on borrowed land, the first chattel houses were purely practical: basic wooden bungalows, easy to dismantle and put up elsewhere. Palatial plantation houses aped their British antecedents — Georgian and Jacobean mansions, impractically relocated. Fittingly, the chattel houses have endured, while many of the plantation houses are hollow ruins. But not all of them. Some of these colonial relics have been lovingly preserved. Recently I went to two of them, and saw another side of Barbados, a world away from the beach bars along the western shore.
First I went to Colleton House, a robust pile on a steep promontory high above the clear blue ocean. It was built by Sir John Colleton, a royalist veteran of the English Civil War. The contents are a rich hotchpotch: modern art in the main house; tribal artefacts in the stables. There’s an ancient cannon outside, installed to guard against invaders. Yet it was the crumbling slave quarters in the lush gardens which lingered longest in my mind’s eye.
We drove on, across the island, to Clifton Hall, on the wild Atlantic, where the owner, a Glaswegian Italian called Massimo Franchi, welcomed us in for a rum punch. Like Colleton House, Clifton Hall dates back to the 1600s, but here the mood is much more homely.
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