Trent Park House of Secrets review – The bugged stately home where German prisoners gushed their secrets | Museums

History happened here. I mean history happens everywhere. But serious and important world-shaping history happened at Trent Park.

Built on the grounds of Enfield Chase, an area of ​​the Hertfordshire countryside used as hunting grounds by royalty, this country house has lived many lives. It has been a Georgian retreat, a Victorian mansion, a post-Edwardian retreat, and then, during World War II, a place of secrets. It later became a university campus, before falling into disuse. Now it has been revived, and its hidden stories have come to light.

The house was built after George III leased some land to his favorite physician, Sir Richard Gibb, in the 1770s. It ended up in the hands of the Bevan banking family, who expanded and remodeled it, before the Sassoon family owned it and did the same. Society magnate Philip Sassoon spent the equivalent of millions transforming it into the 1920s country house of his dreams – a suburban party palace frequented by the likes of Churchill and Wallis Simpson.

Now renovated, the house is largely as Sassoon left it: pastel walls, floral curtains, and countless deep, plush sofas for guests to enjoy. Surrounding a huge bookcase in the library are portraits of Sassoon and his sister Sybil by John Singer Sargent. These are wonderful paintings of Philip, intense, quiet, aloof. Sibyl is dark, elegant and depressing.

But what is between the images is important. Give that bookcase a boost and – hey presto! – Secret entrance to the basement.

Of all of Trent Park’s transformations, this is his greatest: from Aristotle’s hideout to a daring experiment in espionage. After Sassoon’s death in 1939, the government took over the house and used it as a prisoner-of-war camp for senior German generals. Here, in these luxurious surroundings, prisoners were given the time and space to go through the war in comfort, relax and be free. But every inch of the house was bugged, even the rose bushes in the garden, and every conversation downstairs was recorded, largely overheard by German-speaking Jewish refugees. The prisoners felt relieved, they revealed their secrets, and every word was recorded and written down.

Listeners got a lot of information too. The information was provided to the Enigma code-breaking team at Bletchley. General Ludwig Crowell told a fellow high-ranking officer about German ballistics, and the Allies jumped on a V2 rocket. Another person talked about how German planes communicated with a system of transmitted beams, and the British also rejected this.

The basement is faithfully recreated here: a mannequin sits at his station, headphones on, pen at the ready. The captain’s bed is carefully made, and the housekeeper’s cellar is filled with tea, herbs, wine, and German books. It smelled of dampness, the wool blankets were rough and itchy, and the sheets were stiff. This was a place of resistance, of deception, a place where Germans could be lulled into a false sense of security and taken for everything they had.

It wasn’t all good. Listeners heard conversations about German atrocities, but the authorities did nothing with the information. They did not even submit the intelligence to the Nuremberg trials in the 1950s, for fear that their secret technology would be exposed.

For better or worse, everything here has been lovingly recreated, filled with meticulously presented information and era-appropriate ornaments and decor, though it’s a shame there aren’t more original artworks scattered throughout the house rather than reproductions.

The museum focuses largely on the house’s role in the war, mainly because it is interesting, and sets it apart from every other gaudy National Trust-style mansion in this country (although it is certainly still one of those). But it’s the conflicting layers of history embedded in the house’s foundations — covered in paint and wallpaper — that make it feel special. In its transformation from Georgian to Victorian to mock-Georgian to wartime austerity and postwar dereliction, the house becomes a portrait of England’s changing fortunes and tastes, of the way wealth ebbed and flowed, the impact of immigration in shaping the country, and the way war could tear everything apart. That’s the amazing thing about places like this, they’re not just big houses, or rich people’s follies brought back to life, they’re containers of history, and Trent Park has certainly seen his fair share of that.