A new museum, Trent Park House of Secrets, has opened in a redeveloped country house in north London, telling the story of its remarkable transformation from Georgian retreat to Second World War prisoner of war camp. The Guardian's review describes how high-ranking German generals were held there in comfortable, palatial surroundings during the war while every room, and even the garden's rose bushes, was secretly bugged, with German-speaking Jewish refugees listening in from the basement and recording their unguarded conversations.

Built in the 1770s on land leased by George III, the house passed through the Bevan banking family before being remodelled in the 1920s by socialite Philip Sassoon, a friend of Churchill and Wallis Simpson. After Sassoon's death in 1939 it was requisitioned by the government; intelligence gathered from prisoners, including details on German ballistics and the V2 rocket programme, was passed to the Enigma code-breakers at Bletchley Park. The museum has restored both the opulent Sassoon-era interiors and the basement listening post, complete with recreated recording stations and living quarters, before the house later became a university campus and fell into dereliction.