Museums & Institutions
London’s New House of Secrets Museum Reveals Lost Stories of Wartime Spies
The museum has opened in a stately building that was once a base for spies during World War II.
The intriguingly named House of Secrets will be the latest museum to open in London on July 21, when it takes over Trent Park, a palatial country house in the northern suburb of Enfield.
The secrets in question were those closely guarded by a team of spies who carried out high-stakes intelligence missions on behalf of the British government during World War II. Trent Park was one of several secret interrogation centers used by the so-called “Secret Listeners,” a group predominantly made up of Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi prosecution and were using their mother tongue to covertly monitor conversations between high-ranking German prisoners of war.
The captured officers lived in luxury at Trent Park but were unaware that the house and grounds were bugged by a complex network of microphones. These devices were concealed in the walls, light fittings, window ledges, and even outside in plant pots and on benches. Hidden away in basement rooms, meanwhile, the Secret Listeners transcribed and translated conversations that would go on to aid several significant breakthroughs for the Allies.
Overall, some 3,000 conversations were secretly recorded at Trent Park. In one case, information relating to the German “Enigma” cipher machines was recorded and passed on to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. In another instance, two Luftwaffe bomber pilots revealed the system used by Germany to accurately target British munitions factories. Perhaps most importantly of all, loose-lipped General Ludwig Crüwell accidentally alerted British intelligence to the development of German ballistic missiles.
For the first time in over 70 years, the public will be able to access a painstaking recreation of the house’s secret listening stations, offices, and working rooms to learn more about the brave spies who occupied them. Trent Park’s opulent state rooms have also been returned to their former glory, and now appear as they did in 1939, when the estate’s prewar owner, Philip Sassoon, died and the house was requisitioned by the British government.
A lifelong bachelor descending from one of England’s richest banking families, Sassoon inherited and remodeled the Victorian stately home in the early Georgian style. It was decorated with murals by Rex Whistler and housed other treasures that have now been put back on display, including artworks by John Singer Sargent and Philip de László. Sassoon used the resplendent setting to host parties attended by royalty, including King Edward VIII, politicians, including Winston Churchill, and cultural luminaries like Noel Coward, Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, and George Bernard Shaw.
“We have taken great care to reveal the full significance of the house,” said the museum’s director, Giuseppe Albano, by “weaving together stories from some of the most colorful and turbulent years of 20th-century British history.”
The Trent House Trust was established in 2016 as part of a public campaign to have the house restored and converted into a museum.