The parish includes part of the Brackmills Industrial Estate, and borders Delapré Abbey.
[3] There were later workings in the Far Cotton part of the old Hardingstone Parish.Hardingstone Lane was the scene of the Blazing car murder of 1931 which attracted sensational national interest.
The felon, Alfred Rouse, was tried at Northampton Assizes and subsequently hanged in Bedford Gaol on 10 March 1931.
[8] In December 2014, Dr John Bond, forensic science expert at the University of Leicester, said he would look into the possibility of a Mr Brick from Wales being the victim of Rouse.
[12] The Hardingstone district was enlarged in 1874 to take in the ecclesiastical parish of St James, which had been created in 1872 covering the growing western suburbs of Northampton.
The estate was chosen as the site of a 400 ft wind turbine erected by the Asda supermarket chain at one of their warehouses, but this was rejected by the planners.
The village has two pubs: "The Crown" and "The Sun" along with a post office, corner shop and several hairdressers.
Its bottom tier features open books; these probably included painted inscriptions of Eleanor's biography and of prayers for her soul to be said by viewers, which are now lost.
The cross is referred to in Daniel Defoe's A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, where he reports on the Great Fire of Northampton in 1675: ... a townsman being at Queen's Cross upon a hill on the south side of the town, about two miles off, saw the fire at one end of the town then newly begun, and that before he could get to the town it was burning at the remotest end, opposite where he first saw it.Restoration work was completed in 2019.
[21] Whilst the cross was historically part of Hardingstone village, it is now administratively within Far Cotton and Delapre.
The parish church of St Edmund dates back to the 12th century and is mentioned in documents from 1107.
[22] Many members of the Bouverie family (owners of nearby Delapré Abbey) are buried in the vault.