Trent Park continues to captivate all who engage with its unique history. Our vision is to create an immersive learning experience for local, national and international visitors, using creative, engaging and innovative exhibition design. Visitors will travel through the magnificently restored and furnished rooms – Sir Philip Sassoon’s socialite and political world – to reveal the later clandestine operation against Axis POWs and Hitler’s top military commanders.

Our aim is to highlight the vital role played by the Secret Listeners who were behind some of the most important intelligence discoveries of the War, including:

• Information about German technology, and Axis logistics and morale that would give the Allies the edge to win the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, the North African Campaign and the D-Day Landings.

• Devastating testimony that reveals the extent of German and Italian complicity in the Holocaust and war crimes across occupied Europe.

• Some of the first warnings of new developments within Hitler’s deadly V-Weapon and atomic bomb programmes.

• The fallout from the 20 July 1944 ‘Valkyrie’ plot to kill Adolf Hitler and the 1943 overthrow of Benito Mussolini.

The stories hidden within the fabric of Trent Park House reveal a varied, dynamic and nationally important history. This is a powerful and evocative house, where the conversations of the past can echo across time to reach us today and inform us about how our world has come to be as it is.

At the heart of our mission will be a dedicated learning and engagement programme for schoolchildren, community groups and visitors alike, which will support the experiences created in the house, the WWII and Holocaust education strands in the national curriculum and also the experiences and interests of our varied audiences. This includes veterans and their families, social and military historians, and indeed anyone with an interest in our nation’s history.

Trent Park House will provide a focus for audiences to enhance their understanding of this complex and tragic period and to further explore some of the more difficult themes that are part of its history. For schools in particular (but not exclusively) this will include a unique opportunity to explore curriculum studies within the original settings and gain an understanding of the links between bugged conversations and the impact for the War ‘on the ground’ and ‘in the air’. An important new pioneering educational module will reveal what was overheard about the concentration camps and admissions of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and Italian Fascism, to help inform all those that visit Trent Park.

The Trent Park Museum Trust is actively developing an outreach programme (supported by the National Lottery) to local students and other groups in 2020 and 2021.

There is something of the theatrical about Sir Philip Sassoon’s Trent Park, and its subsequent use by the intelligence services during the War - both stories are steeped in artifice and masquerade. We are restoring the main reception rooms with their marble fireplaces, Chinese wallpapers and murals by Rex Whistler with advice from David Mlinaric CBE, the well-known interior designer and specialist in historic decoration.

Our vision for interpretation inside the house recognises this and creates a visitor experience like a play with an enthralling plot. Each act (each storyline) is presented on a different stage (a different room). The play is in two halves - ‘upstairs’ is a story of high society with the guests afforded the hospitality befitting their status in surroundings to match. It then hints at how this luxury is used to subvert and deceive its occupants. Downstairs is a darker story of the secret web that is woven around the wartime occupants of the house, and what it then reveals about the War, its threats and its crimes.