Engraving of Hardwick Park c.1787 by John Bailey


Hardwick Park. c.1856.


The former Lake bed looking towards Hardwick Hall. October 2001


The former Lake bed looking towards the dam. 2001


Sedgefield, Hardwick Park © DCC 2007

Hardwick Park and Garden is a splendid example of a mid 18th century planned landscape close to the village of Sedgefield in the south-east of County Durham. The Garden was created by John Burdon, the son of a Newcastle merchant and business man in his own right with interests in saltpans on the Tyne and coal mines in East Durham. Around 1750 he began to lay out some 40 acres of fashionable gardens composed of temples, follies and grottoes all set around the central feature of a 17 acre lake. Burdon employed some of the finest architects of his day and the principal buildings and park layout are attributed to the London architect James Paine.

Buildings arranged around the lake represented both gothic and classical forms of architecture and were in the order to be visited on a walk around the lake as follows. The Gothic Seat, The Bath-house, The Bono-Retiro and lake cascade, The Temple of Minerva, The Serpentine Bridge, The Statue of Neptune, The Gothic Ruin and finally the Banqueting House.

Over the following 200 years, the Garden and attached 19th century Parkland has been in a steady decline. By 1900 the lake had been drained and the last half of the 20th century saw the collapse and in some cases demolition of several of the fine buildings. Despite this, the structure of the Garden has remained intact and unaltered by later fashions in landscape design. Hardwick today is something of a sleeping beauty and a national treasure, as the only known garden almost exclusively designed by James Paine, and as an unaltered example of 18th century fashion and practice.

Restoration of the Park was begun in 2001 by Durham County Council with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund.