A real-life prisoner-of-war camp, the land was requisitioned from Fitzwilliam Estates in 1942 when tents were erected inside a barbed wire enclosure.
By the following year, a number of huts had been built and the camp was ready to take its first PoWs from the Italian campaign.
But by the end of 1943 the Italians were moved out to make way for Polish forces preparing for the invasion of Europe.
After D-Day, the camp was repurposed to house German prisoners.
Incredibly, the last German PoW didn’t leave the camp until 1949 – four years after the Second World War ended.
In the following decade it was used as an agricultural holiday camp where guests paid for board and lodgings to work on local farms. School children stayed at Eden Camp during school holidays to learn more about the countryside and agriculture.
But by 1955 it was handed back to Fitzwilliam Estates and became a site for drying and storing grain.
Businessman Stan Johnson planned to build a crisp factory on the site when he bought it in 1985, but was persuaded to think again when three Italian former PoWs asked to look around. He cleared the site and turned back the clock to 1942.
Since that time, Eden Camp has become one of the UK’s most important museums dedicated to the Home Front.
In 1992, it won the Yorkshire Tourist Board’s ‘Visitor Attraction of the Year’ and came second in the England for Excellence English Tourist Board’s Awards for Tourism. In 2002, it hosted Prince Philip on a visit to the site.
Since the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of pounds have been invested to make the museum better than ever.
