The Whitworth — Restaurant in Derbyshire Dales

DONT BOOK THE WHITWORTH - Very negative customer Experience

No show appointment - after booking our wedding and paying our deposit with the Whitworth, we organised an initial F2f appointment with the events manager, we drove over an hour to this appointment on the day only to arrive to no staff being present. The Whitworth offered us an apology only for this over 2 months later. Not answering phones - after this no show, it took us weeks to speak to a Whitworth staff member about what had happened because phone calls are often left unanswered and email response times often took them weeks. Loss of previously agreed contracts and wedding agreements - The Whitworth staff asked us to resend the agreed plan of our wedding because they themselves had lost this information. Redacting previous agreements - after waiting anxiously for months to be updated for our wedding plans the Whitworth organised a meeting with us (they attended this one), where we were told by new staff that some changes needed to be made to the previously contractually agreed wedding, including the capacity (dropping us from 150 guests to 110), despite us having already sent save the dates to our guest list. False reassurance - during the above meeting we were reassured and told that the Whitworth were still very keen to host our wedding and that their changes are only minor details, we were told ‘not to worry’ multiple times in this meeting. We sent an email that evening to the Whitworth asking about the possibility of the maximum capacity being 120 guests rather than 110. 5 days later the Whitworth sent us an email saying they are no longer going to host our wedding. They have done this before - when we called the nearby accommodation to cancel our booking, the accommodation said they weren’t surprised with the Whitworth’s actions and that we weren’t the first to have our wedding cancelled like this.

The entirety of this process lasted 5 months. We were offered no compensation for vendors that we had paid deposits to for our wedding. After cancelling our wedding it took the Whitworth over 15 calls and 2 weeks in time to receive our...

Mum is in her 100th year and has Alzheimers so we don't go far and the cafe at the Institute is nearby. We take a walk in the park, the children have fun on the playground and then we go to the cafe on the terrace for tea and cakes.

The scones are just as Mum likes them and there are sweeter cakes for the children, a couple of pots of tea and whatever the children fancy and we are set for the rest of the day. When it's hot we have some of the speciality ice cream which we can heartily recommend.

The place is spotlessly clean and there are toilets with disabled / wheelchair access. Decor is 'country cottage' although really it's a rather tired, large conservatory.

The review before mine remarked that prices are high for a place with little ambience, I agree though the convenience of the hot drinks and the quality of the cakes makes up somewhat. However in recent years we buy our sandwiches and soft drinks from the Coop outside the gate and eat them in the park before having tea! For this reason I'm...

Lovely location. Beautifully kept park, with bowling green, croquet lawn, a lake and a fairly comprehensive children's play area. Even though it used to be free to park, it's only £1.00 for FOUR hours, which is brilliant value!

The cafeteria appears to have changed hands since we were there, last. They've moved the counter to the opposite end and there's no longer any table service...so I had to queue with a fair number of ramblers, who had all come in for coffee and cake, which was a bit of a pain. The Espresso machine was broken, which was unfortunate, but the filter coffees were very good. The homecooked ham in the ham and cheese toasties was lovely.

We didn't think the café had quite the same atmosphere as it used to have; the previous incarnation seemed more family friendly, selling ice creams etc. It's in a lovely building, though, with great views...