Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

London’s Newest Museum Elevates Sir Philip Sassoon Above Lessons from World War II History

Trent Park House of Secrets could have had a historic legacy on par with that of Bletchley Park but makes a mystery of its priorities.

The Piccadilly line from Heathrow famously terminates at Cockfosters, leaving most American tourists to disembark in central London having giggled at the station’s announcement along the way, but seldom investigating what lies at the last stop in the far north of the city. However, the newly opened Trent Park House of Secrets offers three distinct if disjointed reasons to further investigate, and interrogate, the city’s latest war museum, a vanity project that could have been so much more than a cultural amenity improbably tucked into a luxury real estate development at the center of 400 acres of historic parkland.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

First, there’s the museum’s ground floor, which serves as a decorative homage to its former owner, Sir Philip Sassoon, a wealthy Iraqi-Jewish merchant turned politician and patron of the arts, who turned his mansion into London’s last great pre-war salon, where he had a Gatsby-like passion to entertain high society from Chaplin to Churchill.

Then there’s the museum’s basement, which packs in Trent Park’s once-secret wartime relevance, only declassified a half century after Nazi Germany’s surrender. Immediately upon Sassoon’s passing in 1939, his estate was requisitioned by British military intelligence and transformed into the Cockfosters Camp. Sassoon’s prized collection of art and antiquities was packed and shipped to his nephew’s home at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, and the residence was repurposed into a high-security prison for high-ranking Nazi officers captured in northern Africa and France.

Of course, you might just be in the market for a new........

© Observer