The Cambridgeshire village with only 56 residents used as prisoner of war camp in WWII

This wasn’t always the case – the village has a vast history with many people connected to it

Driving down the A1 you would quite easily miss the turning for the quiet and tiny village of Diddington, near Huntingdon. Cambridgeshire’s smallest village is an absolute gem despite not really having much there.

It sits directly next to the busy dual carriageway and covers only 526 hectares. According to the Office for National Statistics, it had a population of just 56 people in 2016. This makes it the very smallest village in Cambridgeshire.

In fact, it’s so small that it doesn’t even appear on TripAdvisor! That’s probably due to the fact that it only has a church and village hall, which doesn’t really account for much tourism.

Despite not having much there now, this tiny village has a vast history in a military sense. During the Second World War, it housed prisoners of war and was used as a transit camp, then it became home to the 49th American Station Hospital, the second largest American hospital in England.

After the war, it became a Polish Resettlement Camp for displaced people and remained home to a large Polish community until the late 1950s. For such a small place, it has a very fascinating and diverse history.

The village today could also very easily be the set of a period drama, with tiny whitewashed cottages, wooden fences and a countryside lane with no road markings but verges spotted with the white of the first snowdrops in Spring.

So what is actually there today? Well its main attraction is definitely its local church, the parish Church of St Lawrence. This tiny little village church has the original 13th-century font still present.