Hardwick Hall - Today

Today

Hardwick is open to the public. It has a fine garden, including herbaceous borders, a vegetable and herb garden, and an orchard.

The extensive grounds also contain Hardwick Old Hall, a slightly earlier house which was used as guest and service accommodation after the new hall was built. The Old Hall is now a ruin. It is administered by English Heritage on behalf of the National Trust and is also open to the public. Many of the Old Hall's major rooms were decorated with ambitious schemes of plasterwork, notably above the fireplaces. Remarkably, impressive fragments of these are still to be seen (protected by preservative coatings and rain-shields), though most of the building is unroofed.

Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank selected the Hall as one of his five choices for the 2006 BBC television documentary series Britain's Best Buildings.

Although the hall was unconventional in its own time and did not spawn many contemporary imitators, it would serve, three centuries later, as a source of inspiration for the enormous Main Exhibition Building at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Hardwick Hall was an ideal model for a building which was intended to merge historicism with the large expanses of glass that had, become de rigueur for the main exhibition halls at international expositions and fairs in the wake of the enormous success of The Crystal Palace constructed for the 1851 London Exhibition.