diamond geezer

Open House weekend two started with this motley quartet.

Open House: Trent Park: House of Secrets (Cockfosters)

The Secret One

Here's London's newest museum, opened just three months ago in a former stately home amid parkland beyond Cockfosters. Trent Park has been a socialite's retreat, a wartime intelligence centre and a university campus, the new museum showcasing only the first two of these. I last went on a tour of the house in 2012 just before Middlesex University sold up and moved out, since when an alternative educational proposition has fallen through and Berkeley Homes have built some stonkingly expensive houses in and around the mansion. But they didn't apartmentalise the lower two floors which have become a £14 visitor attraction, an admission charge kindly waived for Open House. Also our tour guide was the museum's Director whereas normally you just wander round, so even more of a good deal than usual.

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You start out on the ground floor in the world of Sir Philip Sassoon, aristocrat, cabinet minister and bon viveur. He bought Trent Park and fashioned it into an elegant country house surrounded by landscaped grounds, inviting a Who's Who of Thirties society to join him there. Charlie Chaplin signed into the visitors book with a comic squiggle (see display case in room two). The museum trust have gone to great lengths to deck out the first four rooms with the correct decor, either the actual items or top quality replicas, and having seen how the university left it (orange plastic chairs stacked in the corner, overhead projector affixed to the wall) have done an excellent job. The Chinese wallpaper in the saloon looks so much better now, almost like no students had ever brushed up against it.

One of the perks of a tour with the Director is that he can break off from the approved route, in this case out onto the back terrace where guests were once entertained. The view'll be better when the huge pile of earth on the former lawn has been turned into something prettier and you can finally see the lake again, which I suspect will especially please the tenants in the upstairs Berkeley apartments. Back inside the house the fourth and final period room is the library, this now laid out to tell the story of the dawn of WW2. Sir Philip missed out by dying three months beforehand, thus Trent Park was immediately available for the government to requisition and turn into a home for prisoners of war. Head through the secret door in the bookcase to find out how.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Kendrick had the brilliant idea of housing captured German generals here in relative luxury, then bugging the entire house so their conversations could be recorded. A team of transcribers worked shifts in the basement, many of them German-speaking Jewish refugees, listening out for careless talk and capturing it (seven minutes at a time) on vinyl discs. Additional tricks included sending in fake Nazi sympathisers, sending the officers on fieldtrips and interrogating them really badly in the hope they'd boast about unspilled secrets afterwards. And it worked! Amongst the gamechanging information obtained was an early key to how Enigma machines worked (1940), how the Luftwaffe were targeting munition factories so accurately (1941) and the existence of a new fearsome weapon called the V2 (1943). Without Trent Park these doodlebugs would have arrived months earlier, whereas instead the RAF were able to bomb the test site and save not just thousands of lives but also oodles of morale.

The second half of the museum is thus a walk back through the basement via a warren of compact spaces, learning the minutiae of the wartime story as you go. The Director abandoned us here to explore at our own pace, partly for reasons of space but also because I suspect he's a tad tired of the sausage factory of showing another 20 polite souls round exactly the same exhibits telling exactly the same story, fabulous story though it is. And after one last chance to take a selfie of yourself cutting a disc it's back up to the gift shop, circuit complete. It is essentially two museums in one which is always good value, plus there's the obligatory well-heeled cafe round the corner if you can't yet face the slog back to the tube station. Just be careful what you gossip about because you never know who's listening.

Open House: WilkinsonEyre (Shoreditch)

The Dangleway's One

Another weekend another architects' practice, this time WilkinsonEyre who've recently moved to new premises near the Old Street roundabout. None of that hotdesking nonsense here because everyone gets their own dedicated space, also they've retrofitted with care, also they had members of staff taking visitors on brisk informative walkabouts which is quite the best way to do it. Oh, I thought on several occasions, you're the ones who did that... the Copper Box, Battersea Power Station, 8 Bishopsgate, those stands at Lord's, Stratford Market Depot, King's Cross's gasholders, the Crystal and even Boris's cablecar, and that's just within London. Apparently they have 80 staff right now working on the design for Old Oak Common, a station whose connective purpose hasn't even been agreed yet, but they have at least settled the sinuous form of the platform roof so expect to see a start on that next year.

Open House: 44 Monsell Road (Highbury)

The Condensed One

It wouldn't be Open House without the opportunity to take off your shoes to walk round someone's home, usually an architect, invariably unorthodox. This year my barefoot venue of choice was a teensy shoddily-built Victorian box just round the corner from Arsenal station, known locally as the Blue House. Architect Edward Farleigh-Dastmalchi saw its potential and transformed it into a unique family home, essentially keeping only three wonky brick walls and cramming in an extra bedroom up top. You visit these places to pick up tips - how to create a garden terrace out of nothing, how to hide a washing machine behind your TV, how to source blinds for your skylights, that kind of thing - or else simply to be amazed at the creativity that makes 54m² seem positively spacious. Top tip, minimise your circulation space (or move way out of London, obv).

Open House: Plaistow Hub (Plaistow)

The Nuclear One

Here's one of no importance unless you live in E13, in which case it's been transformational. A few small patches of underused land by the tube station have been repurposed by Newham council to create 182 new homes, one-third affordable, plus a range of other previously non-existent amenities. The key building is a 21-storey block of flats somehow squeezed in alongside the railway, now a towering landmark in the neighbourhood. We only got to visit a flat on the 10th floor but that offered fantastic views towards the Dartford Bridge, Canary Wharf and (from a completely different window) West Ham station and the City. I never thought I'd ever consider Plaistow to be scenic but from up here it somehow is. The building also contains an events room (hireable rather than communal) and a large first floor terrace overlooking the street (communal but empty).

At street level a new Station Square has been created, activated by a coffee shop and a Co-op, plus a brand new connecting staircase down to London Road which I give thanks for every time I pop round to see BestMate. Apparently the gym behind the supermarket has four storeys and is already the busiest in East London, which is perhaps a reflection on how little else there is to do in Plaistow. A separate residential building on the other side of the railway bridge is heavily constrained by the footprint of a passing sewer, and underneath contains a brand new Plaistow Library which should be opening within weeks. A nice touch is the palindromic ironwork on the staircase down to the playground, which is perhaps the maximum amount of whimsy a council-led project can condone. And I came on the tour because I've watched all this go up over the last few years, turning nothing much into a lively new civic focus, and sometimes it's nice to thank the architects first hand.