Eden Camp Modern History Theme Museum

The Eden Camp Modern History Theme Museum is a family-run enterprise that has been in operation for almost 30 years. It was erected on an agricultural tract on the outskirts of Malton by a small detachment of army troops who had journeyed from Castle Douglas, Scotland, in early 1942 as a prisoner of war camp. Their mission was to build a barbed-wire fence and erect tents to create a makeshift camp to house Italian prisoners of war taken by Allied forces in North Africa. The camp was named for its position on Eden House Road, and its first occupants, 250 Italian prisoners, were taken from Oldham and paraded across Malton to their new home. They started building a bigger and more substantial camp after they were situated. Eden Camp’s 45 huts were augmented with a huge area of tented housing at its height, allowing it to hold about 1200 inmates at a time. With the victorious Allied invasion of Normandy in the summer of 1944, the Italian captives were replaced by German POWs. The Germans, like the Italians before them, were primarily employed in local agriculture and stayed in the huts at Eden Camp until 1948, once they were eventually freed, three years after the war ended.