Upton House

In September 1939, the day after Britain declared war, 22 staff from a City of London bank moved into a country house on the border of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire. Upton House belonged to Walter Samuel, the 2nd Viscount Bearsted, whose father had founded the Shell oil company, and the family bank, M. Samuel and Co., worked from here through the war. Secretaries typed among the paintings, and the clerks slept in shared dormitories. The National Trust has since returned a dozen rooms to their wartime look.

The paintings are the reason most visitors come. Bearsted bought Upton in 1927 and remodelled it with a top-lit picture gallery, and in 1948 the house and his collection passed to the National Trust. One highlight is The Dormition of the Virgin by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a small picture painted in shades of grey that once belonged to Rubens. Another is an Adoration of the Kings triptych attributed to Hieronymus Bosch, the Netherlandish painter of demons and dreams. Its central panel is a variant of the Bosch triptych in the Prado in Madrid, and how much of it is his own hand is still discussed. Around the edges, painted in grey, demons fly over a procession of strange riders and a gallows.

Even the old squash court has been turned into a gallery, used for displays such as posters from Shell's own advertising collection.