Women Who Make Festival At Hardwick Hall

On Saturday 30 May 2026, Hardwick Hall will become the setting for an extraordinary celebration of creativity, heritage and women’s voices as the Women Who Make Festival transforms the historic estate into a vibrant space for conversation, making, storytelling and collective experience.

Part of the wider Derbyshire Makes programme, the festival has been curated and delivered by Local in partnership with the National Trust and marks an important moment in the lead-up to the 500th anniversary of the birth of Bess of Hardwick - one of the most influential and visionary women of the Elizabethan age.

For one day, the grounds surrounding Hardwick Hall will become a welcoming festival village filled with artist markets heritage crafts, live demonstrations, poetry, talks, workshops, walks and large-scale participatory making. Located entirely outside the pay barrier, the event has been intentionally designed to be open and accessible to all - inviting local communities, families, creatives and curious visitors alike to encounter Hardwick Hall in a new way.

At its heart, Women Who Make is about visibility.

It asks important questions about who gets recognised as a creator, whose labour is valued, whose stories are preserved, and how women continue to shape culture, place and identity through making. These themes feel particularly resonant at Hardwick Hall, a site so deeply connected to a woman who used architecture, textiles and design to assert her own presence in a world that rarely gave women public power.

Bess of Hardwick was not simply a patron of creativity - she was a cultural strategist, builder, commissioner and self-author. Her initials remain woven into the fabric of Hardwick Hall itself, embedded into architecture, interiors and textiles as a declaration of identity and legacy. Five hundred years later, Women Who Make invites a new generation of women to continue that conversation.

The festival programme reflects this rich dialogue between past and present.

Throughout the day, visitors will encounter women artists, makers, poets, historians, conservators and community practitioners exploring themes of identity, labour, memory, care, storytelling and creative agency through contemporary and heritage practices alike.

Among the festival highlights is Threads of Identity, an in-conversation event bringing together artist Sophie Gresswell and Hardwick Hall curator Liz Waring to explore portraiture, textiles and the hidden narratives carried through making. Set against the backdrop of Hardwick’s globally significant collections, the conversation considers how women have historically used materials, symbolism and craft to communicate power, identity and personal expression across generations.

Another key moment within the programme is Behind the Seams: Conservation Studio, led by textile conservator Terri Dewhurst. Offering a rare behind-the-scenes insight into the National Trust Textile Conservation Studio, the session reveals the extraordinary skill, patience and craftsmanship involved in preserving some of the country’s most treasured historic fabrics and furnishings. Through live demonstrations and informal conversation, visitors will gain insight into conservation not only as technical work, but as a form of cultural care and stewardship.

The relationship between landscape, creativity and sustainability also runs throughout the festival. Artist Abigail Wastie will lead natural dye walks and workshops exploring how plants and organic materials found within the Hardwick estate can be transformed into colour and pigment. These sessions reconnect making with ecology, seasonality and slow craft traditions, while encouraging visitors to see the surrounding landscape as both inspiration and material resource.

Participation sits firmly at the centre of the festival experience.

One of the largest and most ambitious activities of the day is the Dare to Dream Sewing Bee - a drop-in collective making space led by artist Sue Reddish alongside special guest Alex Murphy from BBC’s The Great British Sewing Bee and Derbyshire Makes artist Jenny Steele. Visitors will be invited to create banners, flags and garments from reclaimed and unwanted fabrics, transforming textiles into bold statements of hope, imagination and future possibility.

The sewing bee reflects wider themes within Derbyshire Makes around circular creativity, community participation and the enduring political and emotional power of cloth. It also resonates strongly with Hardwick Hall itself, whose internationally important textile collections speak to centuries of labour, artistry and domestic making often carried out by women and rarely fully acknowledged within official histories.

Alongside this, visitors can encounter the Blackwell Brides installation curated by Platform Thirty1 - a moving community heritage project exploring memory, ritual and identity through wedding dresses, oral histories, photography and stitched artefacts gathered from residents across Blackwell Parish. Originally developed through the wider Home Truths project, the installation offers intimate glimpses into everyday lives and celebrations while demonstrating how community storytelling can become a powerful form of cultural preservation.

The programme also embraces playfulness, reflection and joy.

Visitors can take part in pop-up poetry sessions where poets create personalised poems live on vintage typewriters, contribute to a growing live portrait exhibition exploring self-expression and identity, join mindful nature writing workshops in the gardens, or simply spend time exploring the marketplace of women-led creative businesses and contemporary craft practitioners from across Derbyshire and beyond.

Importantly, Women Who Make is not conceived as a standalone event, but as part of a wider and growing movement within Derbyshire Makes - a year-round programme championing women’s creativity, labour and lived experience through talks, walks, workshops and collective making opportunities. Since launching, the programme has generated incredibly positive feedback from participants who describe it as a rare and much-needed space for connection, confidence, visibility and mutual support.

For Local, curating and delivering an event like this as part of Derbyshire Makes 2026 feels particularly significant.

The partnership with the National Trust has created an opportunity not only to animate a nationally important heritage site through contemporary creative practice, but to open up wider conversations about women’s authorship, leadership and cultural legacy at a moment of growing public interest in the story of Bess of Hardwick.

As Hardwick Hall prepares to mark Bess’s 500-year anniversary next year, Women Who Make offers a powerful reminder that heritage is not static. It is something continually shaped and reinterpreted through people, participation and contemporary voices.

And for one day this May, Hardwick Hall will become a place where women’s creativity is not simply displayed, but celebrated loudly, publicly and collectively.