Can you keep a secret? Trent Park House kept quite a few. On Saturday 24 October, Southgate District Civic Voice is inviting you to hear some of them.
The SDCV meeting, Trent Park House of Secrets, runs from 2.30pm to 4.30pm at Walker Lower Hall. The speaker is someone who knows the house better than almost anyone: Dr Giuseppe Albano MBE, director of the new Trent Park House of Secrets museum, which opened in July 2026.
Meet your guide
Dr Albano has more than 14 years’ experience running museums and cultural heritage sites. He was Director of the Freud Museum London from 2022 to 2025, and before that he was Curator and Director of the Keats–Shelley House in Rome. He’s moved from psychoanalysis to Romantic poets to wartime espionage, so he’s well suited to a house with this many layers.
A house with two lives
Trent Park House is one of England’s great country houses, remodelled in the 1920s by Sir Philip Sassoon. For a while it was all elegant rooms and grand gatherings.
After Sassoon died in 1939, the house began a very different second chapter as a wartime surveillance centre. Hidden in the basement were the “Secret Listeners”, intelligence operators who quietly eavesdropped on senior German prisoners held upstairs. What they overheard led to some of the most important intelligence breakthroughs of the Second World War.
The new museum tells their story, and the site is now recognised as being of national and international significance, on a level with Bletchley Park. All of that happened right on Southgate’s doorstep.
Why go?
Expect stories, secrets and memories from the man who helped bring the museum to life. Whether you’re a history buff, a local who’s walked past Trent Park a hundred times, or you just enjoy a good spy story, this is a chance to hear the inside story of one of the area’s most remarkable places.
The details
- What: SDCV Meeting: Trent Park House of Secrets
- When: Saturday 24 October, 2.30pm–4.30pm
- Where: Walker Lower Hall, London
- Who: Talk by Dr Giuseppe Albano MBE, hosted by Southgate District Civic Voice
- Tickets: Book via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sdcv-meeting-trent-park-house-of-secrets-tickets-1997842767498
The listening equipment is long gone, but you’ll still want to keep your ears open for this one.
