The creation of grand houses and attractive estates with money from the slave trade and slavery, are to be seen through out Britain and the Caribbean.

In 1792, Samuel Galton Jnr, with his wife Lucy Barclay, purchased Warley Hall Estate and laid the foundation for what we know as Warley Woods and Lightwoods Park. The celebrated landscape architect Humphrey Repton in 1794, was commissioned to create a setting worthy of his new house to be built in his country estate at Warley. Repton set out his ideas for Warley in one of his famous Red Books, so called because he bound them in red leather.

One of the major titled landowners in the area (1st Viscount Dudley and Ward) was the owner of three plantations in Jamaica. Plantation profits were used to finance the rebuilding of the Viscount's seat (Himley Hall). In 1740 Himley Hall was a manor with a medieval moated manor.