Hardwick, Cambridgeshire

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Map sources for Hardwick, Cambridgeshire at grid reference TL373587

Hardwick is a small village in Cambridgeshire about 6 miles west of Cambridge, just off the A428 Cambridge-St Neots road. It is about 4 miles east of the completely new village of Cambourne.

The original village of Hardwick is hundreds of years old, and consists of only a few houses, with an estate of hundreds of houses being built within the last forty years. Major development in the village ceased over twenty years ago, the only building work now being some infilling where there was space, or people building extensions.

The village is unremarkable, in that there is just one pub (The Blue Lion), two churches and one village shop/postoffice. There are also various retail outlets including a huge pet store called Pet-Paks. There are now no restaurants to speak of in the village after a fire gutted the two main eateries in Hardwick, Yakut Turkish Restaurant and Hardwick Curry and Pizza in late November 2006.

Anatune Ltd, a rapidly growing scientific instrument company is based in Broadway house on St Neots Road.

A small number of local businesses are in the same block of buildings called Newton House, behind which is a British Telecom branch exchange for the 01954 code.

[edit] Internet history

In the 1990s Unipalm started up there, their internet provider offshoot Pipex became very big and was later bought by UUNET/PIPEX which became part of MCI Worldcom before collapsing with the dot-com collapse. The brand name Pipex is still in use, but isn't the same company at all.
Invisible Networks set up broadband using 802.11b, covering, Hardwick and other villages West and North of Cambridge, but it didn't take off quickly enough and when BT unexpectedly rolled-out ADSL to these smaller villages, it killed their market.