Hardwick, Cambridgeshire 4.12

Hardwick is a village and civil parish in the county of Cambridgeshire, England with a large housing estate located about west of the city of Cambridge, England. The village lies immediately south of the A428 road between Cambridge and St Neots. It is about east of the newly developed village of Cambourne. The village is nearly on the Greenwich Meridian. The northern border of the village is St Neots Road, now largely bypassed by the A428, with no houses or property on the north side of the road. In the 2001 census, the population was 2,630 in 946 households, increasing to 2,670 in 1,017 households at the 2011 Census.Historically, the hamlet of Hardwick is hundreds of years old with the first recorded mention in 991 AD and an entry in the Domesday Book of 1086. Hardwick used to consist of just a few houses and farmland around St Mary's Church, on what is now the southern edge of the hamlet. It has expanded greatly since the 1960s, mainly due to an estate of hundreds of houses built on the orchard land to the north of the original hamlet, with the roads taking the names of the displaced trees (e.g. Ellison, Bramley, Limes, Pippin, Quince, Worcester...).Although significant building ceased, a number of new houses have been built over the years all over the hamlet - wherever developers were able to acquire any plots of land; these are often the once large gardens of the earliest estate houses.