Digital reviews | Wartime history, the Olympic Museum and living maps

Website | Trent Park House of Secrets, London

I think I can safely say that the majority of readers will have heard of Bletchley Park and could probably have a decent stab at describing what happened there during the war years. I suspect, however, that very few of us could do the same about Trent Park – a grand stately home in London, with a comparable clandestine wartime history.

Currently being restored to its former glory, Trent Park was the former home of the Bevan family, and then the Sassoon family. But at the outbreak of world war two the estate was requisitioned by the government and became a bugging and interrogation centre for captured Lüftwaffe, German navy and Italian military personnel who were suspected of holding valuable wartime information.

The restored physical site in Enfield will open to the public in 2025, but in the meantime we can delve into this digital version, designed to tell the story of Trent Park’s remarkable Secret Listeners. This new resource describes how, using 1940s state-of-the art technology, these listeners hid in the basement of the house.

Overhead, undercover interrogators, often posing as captured German officers, encouraged captives into conversations on certain topics, of which the hidden listeners could hear every word, with devices hidden in light fittings, windowsills, under the billiard table, and even in trees. 

It’s an easy-to-digest and engaging site, with small vignettes, accompanied by photographs, oral history recordings and scrollable timelines. As I make my way through this fascinating resource, I find it hard to fathom how this ground-breaking wartime tale has remained hidden in the basement of our own national wartime narrative for so long.

A recent lottery-funded oral history project, led by the Trent Park Museum Trust, has gathered memories
from those with personal connections, and through their recollections, this captivating story of how some of the war’s most important intelligence discoveries were made here, can finally be told.

Website | The Olympic Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland

To mark the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, Switzerland’s Olympic Museum in Lausanne, home to “the world’s largest and most complete collection of Olympic heritage, including artefacts, archives, images, books and film”, has launched a new website.

A headline banner of Olympic Stories, appearing on the homepage, turns up just a solitary story about how women eventually conquered the Olympic marathon. It’s an excellent bit of short-form web content, bringing together film and sound archives, collections and photography, but I’d like to see more jumping off points, encouraging users to explore in-depth pieces of content if they wished too.

I’d also like more stories – the site claims to have stories about how the Olympic spirit continues to influence our lives today. However, I couldn’t find a way of getting beyond the Collections landing page – clicking on a button marked “artefacts”, for instance, just looped me back to the landing page.

There is a great selection of Olympic films and a podcast series that definitely warrant a deeper dive when time allows, but these felt separate – existing content perhaps that had just been tacked-on rather than curated into the digital experience. Brought up in a family of Olympic Games obsessives, but having never visited the Olympic Museum, I was expecting to lose myself in the pages of this new website. Instead, despite looking beautiful, the site feels like it is in a pre-launch, beta stage with only an outline of the intended site available to view. Maybe there is more
to come. I do hope so.

Wayfinding | Living Map

When I worked at the Science Museum in the early 2000s, we faced the perennial problem of how to devise useful maps and guides to help orientate visitors. 

We had no idea that one day we would carry systems in our pockets that could locate us with accuracy.

Axiell recently announced a partnership with Living Map, an internal waypointing system that tells visitors where they are in a museum and also provides a layer of interpretation that hooks into the CultureConnect content management system. All of this is available through smartphone devices.

The demo from the Met in New York is impressive and shows much more detail than Google’s Indoor Map functionality, and is highly tailored to museums and their audiences.