London's new World War Two museum about spies and espionage opened this week
The walls were listening
A museum dedicated to the secret spy and intelligence operations that went on during World War Two has opened in North London.
I don’t think we can do much better than to regurgitate the museum’s own explanation of the Trent Park House of Secrets. It sounds more like the synopsis of a Netflix show than a museum intro:
“In the 1920s and 1930s, Trent Park House was Sir Philip Sassoon’s glamorous country retreat, host to prime ministers, royalty and film stars.A decade later it held a darker secret,” the museum team explains.
“POWs including captured German generals and senior officers were housed here in apparent comfort, never knowing that the Secret Listeners were monitoring their conversations and gathering intelligence that helped change the course of the war.”
We're already halfway through our popcorn.
A hidden slice of history
On the outside the Trent Park House of Secrets looks like a lush stately home, and inside it has been restored to how it would have appeared in the 1930s — also pretty stately home-like, to be honest. But behind the luxury there are the listening rooms, decked out with replicas of the sort of equipment that would have been used back in the day.
Before it took on this unlikely role, the house was owned by Sir Philip Sassoon, who was friend to both Winston Churchill and Edward VIII. But after his death in 1939 the place was requisitioned by the government.
Trent Park House of Secrets director Dr Giuseppe Albano invites us to “discover the covert intelligence operation that took place here during the Second World War.”
But the museum also apparently digs into the place’s wider context as a part of 20th century British history.
You can find out what this entails by visiting yourself. Adult tickets cost £14 a pop, those aged under five get in for free and 5-17-year-old and students pay £12.
The Trent Park House of Secrets is clearly going to be compared to Bletchley Park, the famous code-breaking country house that was a key part of the Allied war effort. And while Trent Park doesn’t quite have the gravitas or significance of that place, it sure is easier to get to for Londoners.
The Trent Park House of Secrets sits just a few hundreds metres away from the Cockfosters Underground station, on the Piccadilly line.
The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm, and tickets are available for slots up to six weeks in advance. You specify an hour slot when booking, but the website suggests the staff will be lenient if you miss your slot thanks to Tube delays or similar.
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