Burdon and Paine transformed the grounds into everyone’s idea of what  a romantic landscape should look like.  The Park was laid out around a  spring-fed lake of about 17-acres, with a serpentine river ‘tail’ to the south. It featured a circuit walk in the same manner as those at Rousham and  Stourhead. This circled the lake taking in the 14 structures designed by Paine, including two bridges, two cascades, an island statue, a grotto and a sequence of buildings which alternated between classical and gothic design whilst progressing through the classical orders. All were tightly positioned within carefully calculated geometric relationships.

detail from the 1856 Ordnance Survey , and with the circuit walk shown in red

Unfortunately towards the end of his life Burdon had financial problems and in 1790 sold the estate for £40,000 to a neighbouring landowner, William Russell, who proceeded to lay out the East Park [roughly where the E is on the the map above] and complete the planting programme begun by Burdon to the south of the house.

The title page of a 14 page guide book, 1800

Luckily Burdon, Russell and subsequent owners opened the park to the general public and this means that there are quite a few descriptions of the house and grounds, although they do bear a striking resemblance to each other!  The earliest is a one page account in Town and Country Magazine in 1770,  called ” The Beauties of Hardwick-Gardens displayed”  [A full list with links where possible will included at the end of next weeks post.]

Many observers play on the park’s magnificence saying that that words were inadequate to describe the experience, although as Caroline Donoughue notes wryly that did not stop them  “naturally continuing on to attempt to describe their experience in words, often a great many of them.”  If you are interested in exploring this idea further, especially in relation to Hardwick then see Dougherty’s 2014 conference paper: “Romantic Places’Text and Materiality at Hardwick Park, County Durham” at:

Click to access bars2014.pdf

image taken from Reawakening

Although, as can be seen from the aerial photo above,  The lake drained away [probably in the mid-19thc because of structural problems with the dam] most of the rest of the estate was well maintained until the mid-1920s when the Russells sold the estate to a Capt. Ramsden. Ramsden and his family then gradually leased or sold off  chunks of the estate, although they retained the area around the house.

The Hall
image taken from Reawakening

During the Second World War the hall was used as a maternity home and briefly, as a billet for Bevin Boys, whilst the army took temporary possession of the park in the late 1940s.  It was during this period, as so often, that  rapid deterioration set in.

It didn’t help that the parkland was divided in the 1960s by the Sedgefield bypass cutting through.

In 1963 the mansion was turned it into a hotel, and a few years later, in 1972, Durham County Council purchased a 50 acre section south of the circuit walk to create a  Country Park.  But the council later considered that the remaining garden structures were a danger to the public and planned to demolish them.  This sparked a local outcry, with Sedgefield Civic Society leading the fight to save them and eventually the demolition plans were thrown out after a public inquiry in 1981. The first step on the road to recovery was the award-warning rebuilding of James Paine’s Gothic bridge.

The view from the Grand Terrace to the Gothic tower DM July 2015

However it was not until 1996 when a local doctor stumbled across the flattened remains of the Bath House and contacted local councillor – and later leader of the county council – Ken Manton  that the campaign to save the historic core really got under way.  The Friends of Hardwick were formed in 1998 to help in the resurrection and Tony Blair, the local MP, became their president  and, led by Manton, the process gathered momentum when English Heritage recognised its historic importance and raised its listing to Grade II*. This in turn encouraged  the Heritage Lottery Fund  to back both a feasibility study for restoration, and  then offer £5 million towards the cost. The County Council then purchased another 150 acres of land, including most of the historic core of the Park.

DM July 2015

The Restoration programme was phased and began in 2003. The first stage  was to  create an expanded country park, comprehensible in its historic content to the visitor but also capable of standing alone, if financial constraints meant that the  second and subsequent phases had to be abandoned.  Apart from recreating the massive lake and the other water features it meant laying out the Grand Terrace, and restoration of most of the major buildings, and beginning a clearance and replanting programme. It also meant a new visitors centre, new car parks and new entrances.  Even then the park was attracting 250,000 visitors a year.

The new visitors centre, DM July 2015

In fact the bulk of the programme was completed by 2009 and today the park is looking almost as good as it did in Burdon’s day, given the decision to conserve rather than rebuild some of the structures.

Michael Rudd as james Paine, from http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/9837189.Pretty_as_a_picture/

Given all this It is surprising that Hardwick is not better known, although this may in part be due to its geographic location, and because of its previously ruined state.   However if not as grand as Stourhead, Painshill or Studley Royal,  Burdon and Paine were at least as ambitious in ideas and intention.  If you are lucky you can hear about their grand schemes by walking the grounds with James Paine himself – or rather since he died in 1789, – with Michael Rudd, the chairman of the Friends of Hardwick Park who brings him back to life every Tuesday afternoon!

So lets take a tour…beginning at the entrance lodge which was only about half a mile from Sedgefield.  According to the 1770 Town and Country Magazine “after passing through a lane planted with a row of trees on each side, we come to a gate, on one side of which stands the gardener’s lodge.”  Unfortunately the lodge was one of the casulaties of the Sedgefield by-pass.

image taken from Reawakening