Qualla: Eden Camp Museum

Eden Camp Museum: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Appleyard (talk), Public domain. Stan Johnson bought the overgrown camp near Malton in 1985 because he was going to put up a potato crisp factory. Then three elderly Italians walked in. They had been prisoners here from 1943, sent up to Yorkshire from the North African campaign, and they wanted to see the place again before they died. Johnson took them around the rotting huts. By the time they left he had abandoned the crisp factory. He spent the next two years clearing brambles and patching roofs, and on 21 March 1987 he opened Eden Camp as a museum. It billed itself, with characteristic Yorkshire confidence, as the world's first Modern History Theme Museum.

Read more: Eden Camp Museum on Qualla

Image: Anthony Appleyard (talk) | Public domain

Eden Camp Museum: From Barbed Wire to Carbon Neutral

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karen Vernon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The War Office requisitioned the land from the Fitzwilliam Estates in early 1942 and started with tents inside a barbed wire fence. By mid-1943 the permanent camp of 33 huts was complete, and the first Italian POWs arrived - captured in Libya and Tunisia, most of them - to be put...

Read more: Eden Camp Museum on Qualla

Image: Karen Vernon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eden Camp Museum: Bread Shoes and Human Torpedoes

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Shreeve, CC BY-SA 2.0. What the huts hold now is not a single exhibit but a labyrinth. Hut 10 is the POW collection - bread that was carved into ornaments, shoes made from rope and tin, the small painful inventiveness of men with too much time. Hut 11 covers the First World War. Huts 24 onward run thro...

Read more: Eden Camp Museum on Qualla

Image: Paul Shreeve | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eden Camp Museum: The Italian Who Made the Shoes

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karen Vernon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Among the artefacts in Hut 10 is a pair of shoes that an Italian POW made out of plaited bread crusts during his time at Eden Camp, simply because he could. The men who came here from 1943 to 1949 lived behind wire on the Yorkshire Wolds while their families across Italy and Germ...

Read more: Eden Camp Museum on Qualla

Image: Karen Vernon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eden Camp Museum: Carbon Neutral by 2030

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Appleyard (talk), Public domain. After the pandemic closures of 2020 and 2021 the museum spent roughly a quarter of a million pounds putting the eighty-year-old buildings back into condition. New roofs, doors, and windows on the original huts. Wildflower meadows sown across the site. A new toilet block running o...

Read more: Eden Camp Museum on Qualla

Image: Anthony Appleyard (talk) | Public domain