Last Updated on 2 May 2025 by Colette
This post features a gifted experience & affiliate links
What. A. Weekend.
Hardwick Festival has been on my radar for a little while now (as you’d expect when I spend so much time writing about festival line ups!) but we’ve always had other festival plans for the same weekend. This year when we saw the line up (Becky Hill, Snow Patrol, Jamie Webster, Reverend and the Makers amongst others), we knew it was time to give it a try!
Celebrating its 10th birthday this August, Hardwick Festival is a boutique festival with a capacity of 10k held in the grounds of Hardwick Hall Hotel, Sedgefield in County Durham.
The plan had always been for Dave to come to Hardwick Festival with us but in the end he wasn’t able to make it so we invited Aunty Custard along for the ride and, whilst we obviously missed Dave, we couldn’t have asked for a better addition to our festival crew than Kirst.
8 reasons why we loved Hardwick Festival (and why we think you would too!)
1. Glamping at Hardwick Festival
I’m going to caveat this post by saying we were lucky enough to be treated to glamping at the festival this weekend which means that I can’t really comment on the experience of camping at Hardwick Festival as a family – I don’t know much about the distance from the car park to the campsite, from the campsite to the main arena or the quality of showers and toilets – all things you would usually want to know from me!
What I can tell you is that glamping was a pure luxury in terms of not having to set up the tent, lug our stuff across fields or queue for showers at any point. It was also really close to the main festival site so we could send Ben back to the tent for extra layers when the girls got cold and meant we didn’t have too far to walk at the end of the night.
We loved having access to the beauty tent with hair dryers and straighteners as well as plug sockets for phone charging! We also appreciated not being camped on top of other festival goers (though the people camped next to us felt that everyone needed to benefit from their music choices on Saturday morning with a fair large Makita speaker set up outside their tent – the urge to ask them to pipe down was strong!)
(Side note, when they recommend you take a torch, they’re not wrong! The glamping site is super dark – Amy had stolen my torch and I tripped over two sets of guy ropes falling flat on my face – I was very lucky to just come away with bruises from that one!)
All in, I know that the privilege of glamping at Hardwick Festival will slightly skew my views compared to our usual festival experience – but it’s definitely a treat I can’t afford to get used to!
2. The smaller capacity
We absolutely loved that Hardwick Festival is a bit smaller than some of the festivals we’ve been to recently with a capacity of just 10k. Everything felt easily accessible, the layout of the site worked really well and we spent next to no time queuing for food or drink (unlike the hour long queue we’d stood in for food at Tramlines last month!)
3. The layout
Hardwick Festival is set in the grounds of Hardwick Hall Hotel, with stunning views of Serpentine Lake and Temple of Minerva to the left of the main stage. The set up of the festival makes use of a pocket of woodland space for the “Into the Trees” arena and little nooks for “Boogie Wonderland” and the “Treehouse Arena”. The “Courtyard Arena” is set behind the hotel and under cover – but we only went in once as kids aren’t allowed in after 6.30pm (I can’t quite work out why?)
Nothing feels too far away and yet each arena feels nicely separate from the others with no sound overlap. Boogie Wonderland was constantly heaving and the Into The Trees space got pretty busy on Saturday evening but staff were on it and implemented a queue to stop the area from becoming over full. Once or twice the Treehouse Arena got pretty busy but staff moved the picnic benches from the area to cope with overspill.
The main stage isn’t huge – or certainly not compared to others we’ve seen – but we loved this as it felt that bit more intimate (maybe intimate isn’t the right word, you’re still in a crowd of thousands, but you know what I mean).
The site itself is on a slight downhill slope which I tend to think works really well for an event like this as you’ve got a better chance of seeing the main stage when it’s at the bottom of a slight incline – of course if it rains, you might find yourself in a mud bath at the bottom! We were super lucky with the weather this weekend and any forecast showers didn’t appear, but I do think it would have been quite a hard festival in the rain as there is nowhere to hide.
We appreciated the number of picnic benches up in the top section of the main arena where most of the food vendors were – they were always busy but with a bit of loitering and some cheeky sharing of tables, we were able to get sat down when we needed to – which made eating easier and was also much needed to rest my back!
I should also mention at this point the team of litter pickers who worked their socks off to keep the site clean and tidy across the course of the weekend.
4. The line up at Hardwick Festival
Because Hardwick Festival is a relatively small festival, I think the line up matters more than at somewhere like Camp Bestival – there’s less going on to distract you if that makes sense. The highlights for us were Becky Hill (a family favourite in our house!), Snow Patrol (even more gorgeous than when we saw them last month), Jeremy Healey (I’m paying the price for our woodland raving but god it was special), Jamie Webster and, Reverend and the Makers who topped our weekend off nicely. It takes a lot to get Ben dancing but it would appear that Reverend and the Makers was it this time!
5. The pricing of food, drink and merch
We were continuously impressed by how fair the pricing of food, drink and merch was at Hardwick Festival – and when I say fair I don’t mean cheap but definitely much better than we’ve experienced elsewhere. You just didn’t feel like you were being squeezed for every penny like you might do at another festival.
A case in point was Amy’s festival tee which cost a tenner – we’d been expecting to pay upwards of £25 for this. Ice creams were 1/3 cheaper than Tramlines last month. Fairground rides were a fiver (which of course soon adds up but it’s still much more palatable than £7+ isn’t it!) The gin cocktails Kirst and I were drinking from Quaff Box were two for £12 – and when you consider a fancy gin and tonic in a bar now is about a tenner, we thought they were pretty good value!
You can read our tips for saving money at a festival with kids here.
6. The number and range of bars
Now I’m not really one for drinking at festivals as a rule so the bars aren’t often on my radar beyond pricing and queues – but one of the things Kirst and I commented on this weekend was just how many bars there were at Hardwick Festival. You had the main bars serving larger, cider, some spirits and soft drinks and then a number of smaller more niche bars selling cocktails or Pimms. Whilst the choice of lager was limited to Amstel or Red Stripe, Dave was absolutely gutted when we sent him a picture of the fact they were serving Guinness on tap – I don’t think we’ve ever seen that at a festival before!
Off the top of my head I can count at least eight different bars in the main section of the festival plus one in each of the smaller arenas. You were not going short of a drink at Hardwick Festival this weekend. I can’t say this meant that everyone was absolutely leathered either – it just meant you didn’t waste time queuing when you could be having fun!
7. The food!
If you’d ever been to a festival with Dave or Ben, you’d know that their next meal is always very important! From the moment they walk into a festival, they are both scoping out food options and making their choices.
Eating at a festival isn’t cheap – we tend to try and take food so that we can have breakfast and lunch at our tent and then we set a budget for tea which is usually £15 per person – this is a limit not a target. Typically you need to be expecting to spend between £10 to £15 for a meal in our experience.
At Hardwick Festival there were plenty of choices – burgers, loaded fries, chicken tikka naan wraps (I think we had about five of these between us over the weekend!), gyros (Chloe definitely had that twice), chicken burgers, loaded Doritos, duck wraps, pizza, donuts, churros, ice cream . . . everything we ate was really good quality too (except perhaps the pulled pork sandwich I had which was tasty but disappointingly tepid). Again, because there was so much choice and the festival didn’t feel rammed, you never queued for very long for food.
8. The people
First up I’m going to give a shout out to the staff – from the security on the gate between glamping and the main site to the bar staff and the security, every single person we spoke to was chatty, friendly and helpful. We spotted security getting involved in a couple of incidents (one involved chasing down a young lad that we think must have jumped a fence and another approaching a group of younger festival goers to check their wristbands and pour away their cider). Situations were were dealt with quickly and security weren’t remotely heavy handed, they were just on it and got stuff sorted so that we were just left with a feeling of being safe and looked after.
And then secondly, the festival goers in general. The atmosphere at Hardwick Festival was fun and friendly, everyone was out for a good time and we didn’t really see anyone who had taken it too far or forgotten that Hardwick Festival is a family friendly event. I commented to Kirst that even for headline sets when the main stage was really busy, it felt really respectful with no surging or pushing.
We had so many random moments with other people – from the lady who insisted on picking Amy up onto her shoulders during Becky Hill to the woman sobbing her heart out during Snow Patrol (Kirst gave her a big squeeze), or the man who do-si-doed with us during the Dolly Parton Show, the man who was surprised we’d travelled up from Manchester for the weekend and shared with me his photographs of the Northern Lights, the couple I chatted to who were drinking wine from proper wine glasses with their breakfast, the man who handed Kirst a massive gin and lemonade at the bar cos he’d accidentally ordered the wrong drink, or the man who I laughed with in the woods when he rolled his sleeves up in time for the breakdown during Jeremy Healy’s set – he meant business! The laughs and smiles we had with people we didn’t know this weekend just added a whole other level of joy.
All in we had a pretty awesome weekend – this was a festival that felt warm and friendly and one where I felt happy to let Ben and Amy wander off together for a bit whilst Chloe, Kirst and I were raving in the woods. Hardwick Festival offered up some pretty special experiences this weekend and we grabbed them with both hands, turning them into core memories and huge smiles.
When I asked the kids for highlights Ben said, ‘nothing specific – it was just a great festival!’ – which at fifteen I think will do nicely.
Tickets for Hardwick Festival 2025 are on sale now.
Check these posts next for more festival content:
Family Friendly Festivals 2025
Ten tips for surviving a festival with kids
UK Festivals you can book day tickets for
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