Life & Culture You’ve met the Windermere Children, here are the ‘Southampton Boys’

The staircase at Wintershill Hall in Hampshire is a thing of great elegance, curving majestically down from an oval landing into the property’s cavernous entrance hall.

If you’d visited during the winter of 1945, however, you’d have seen rope coiling the banister, strategically placed to prevent the children who lived there from “breaking their necks” trying to slide down it.