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Spinner's End: what we know or can surmise about the location of Snape's (and Lily and Tuney's) childhood home
This began life as a LiveJournal essay, but I decided to re-cast it in the same format as my other essays, and tweak it a bit at the same time.
N.B. this version of my Spinner's End drawing, entitled backyard blues, has been saved at a low colour-definition in order to save loading time. You can see the original high-colour version at deviantART, although there isn't much visible difference.
Jump to: What we know about the area Probable style of Snape house Possible floorplans for house Possible locations for Spinner's End From home to Hogwarts What does canon tell us about the area around Spinner's End?
The woman called Narcissa gained the top of the bank, where a line of old railings separated the river from a narrow cobbled street. [cut] Side by side they stood looking across the road at the rows and rows of dilapidated brick houses, their windows dull and blind in the darkness. 'He lives here?' asked Bella in a voice of contempt. 'Here? In this Muggle dunghill? We must be the first of our kind ever to set foot --' [cut] Bella [cut] saw Narcissa darting through an alley between the houses into a second, almost identical street. Some of the street lamps were broken; [cut] she turned another corner, [HBP ch. #02; p. 26]
[cut] they moved deeper into the deserted labyrinth of brick houses. At last Narcissa hurried up a street called Spinner's End, over which the towering mill chimney seemed to hover like a giant admonitory finger. Her footsteps echoed on the cobbles as she passed boarded and broken windows, until she reached the very last house, where a dim light glimmered through the curtains in a downstairs room. [cut] Together they stood waiting, panting slightly, breathing in the smell of the dirty river that was carried to them on the night breeze. [HBP ch. #02; p. 27]
[cut] he saw that he was in a nearly deserted playground. A single, huge chimney dominated the distant skyline. [cut] [cut] Snape looked no more than nine or ten years old, [DH ch. #33; p. 532]
'They live down Spinner's End by the river,' she told Lily, and it was evident from her tone that she considered the address a poor recommendation. [DH ch. #33; p. 534]
Cokeworth is a fictional town in the English midlands where Harry spends a night at the Railview hotel with aunt, uncle, and cousin Dudley. Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime. Although it is never made explicit in the books, Cokeworth is the place where Petunia and Lily Evans and Severus Snape all grew up. [Pottermore]
1) Spinner's End is in a town called Cokeworth, a long way from London. According to Pottermore it's in the Midlands.
2) Cokeworth is an industrial-style mill-town which Rowling thinks of as being or having been grimy and working-class: but we aren't told what sort of mill. The name Spinner's End suggests it's a textile mill but even this is unproven: there's a real street called Spinner's End and it's in a steel-mill area, in the Black Country near Birmingham.
3) The mill is by a river, which means it's probably water/steam-powered. It is obviously disused by 1996, and it has a very tall, thin chimney, tall enough to tower over houses several streets way – as indeed it towers over Spinner’s End.
4) The river flows fast enough to make an audible whisper, but is still dirty enough to be smelled several streets away. It is winding and has rubbish-strewn, overgrown banks which seem to be fairly high and steep (Cissy has to scramble to get up them). There must be a flat bit - perhaps a tow-path or a cycle-path - between the river and the steep bank on at least one side because Cissy and Bella Apparate to the edge of the river without falling over, or in.
5) There is a railing along the top of the bank, then a cobbled street. Brick houses begin on the other side of the street and extend back from it in near-identical straight rows, suggesting a low-grade housing estate probably purpose-built for the workers at the mill.
6) Bellatrix thinks she and Narcissa may be the first pure-bloods to set foot there. She doesn't mean the first witches/wizards, because she knows Snape is there ahead of them. If Bellatrix knows that this is Snape's childhood home, then the implication is that his mother wasn't a pure-blood - or if she was she wasn't of a high enough class for the Black sisters to consider her "our kind".
7) The rows of houses are linked by alleyways, as well as (presumably) by crossing streets.
8) Both the houses and the street-lighting are generally in a poor state of repair. In the late '60s (that is, when Snape is nine) the area is regarded as a poor address, and in summer 1996, at the height of the housing-boom, many, probably most of the houses are empty. A lot of windows are boarded up, which means the area is vandal-haunted as well as bleak. Nevertheless, the area is not totally deserted. Somewhere within walking (or at most cycling) distance of the point where the Black sisters appear, there is a Fish-and-Chip Shop, and enough customers to keep it going. We know this because by the river there are fish-and-chip wrappings, plural, grouped together and fresh enough to attract a fox, and if they had been blown there they would probably have scattered and lost much of their scent.
9) Spinner's End itself is several streets away from Bellatrix and Narcissa’s point of arrival, although still close enough to the water to be classed as “by the river”, and Cissy and Bella turn at least two corners between their point of arrival by the river and Snape's house. It is cobbled.
10) Snape's house is at the end of a row, in fact at the end of the whole street – but we're not told how the street ends. It’s unlikely to be a T-junction or a turning, unless it leads to somewhere very small and unimpressive, because “End” suggests it’s not a through-route to anywhere else. It could be a cul-de-sac. It could end in a wall, or in the grounds of some factory or municipal building. It could end in a bomb-site, a building-site or allotments (see below). Or it could just peter out into open country. We also don’t know whether, as you face Snape’s front door, the end of the road is to the left or to the right.
11) In the late '60s or early '70s the town evidently has a posh end, or at least a posher end, since the Evans girls seem to live in the same area as Severus (they use the same playground), but Petunia looks down on Spinner's End as a low-class address. On Sunday morning, Uncle Vernon sat down at the breakfast table looking tired and rather ill, but happy. [cut] 'That does it,' said Uncle Vernon, [cut] 'I want you all back here in five minutes, ready to leave. [cut]' [cut] Ten minutes later they had wrenched their way through the boarded-up doors and were in the car, speeding towards the motorway. [cut] They drove. And they drove. Even Aunt Petunia didn't dare ask where they were going. Every now and then Uncle Vernon would take a sharp turning and drive in the opposite direction for a while. [cut] They didn't stop to eat or drink all day. By nightfall Dudley was howling. [cut] Uncle Vernon stopped at last outside a gloomy-looking hotel on the outskirts of a big city. Dudley and Harry shared a room with twin beds and damp, musty sheets. Dudley snored but Harry stayed awake, sitting on the window-sill, staring down at the lights of passing cars and wondering ... [PS ch. #03; p. 35] They ate stale cornflakes and cold tinned tomatoes on toast for breakfast the next day. They had just finished when the owner of the hotel came over to their table. [cut] She held up a letter so they could read the green ink address: Mr H. Potter Room 17 Railview Hotel Cokeworth [PS ch. #03; p. 36] 'Wouldn't it be better just to go home, dear?' Aunt Petunia suggested timidly, hours later, but Uncle Vernon didn't seem to hear her. Exactly what he was looking for, none of them knew. He drove them into the middle of a forest, got out, looked around, shook his head, got back in the car and off they went again. The same thing happened in the middle of a ploughed field, halfway across a suspension bridge and at the top of a multi-storey car park. [PS ch. #03; p. 36] Harry’s mother and Snape were childhood friends. Growing up in their tiny Muggle town of Cokeworth, they bonded over their magical powers like other kids do over toys. [Pottermore essay: The chapter that made us fall in love with… Severus Snape] 12) Cokeworth is a very long way from Surrey, since the Dursleys drive from just after Sunday breakfast until after a July nightfall to get there - albeit with a lot of weaving about and doubling back. This reinforces point 1). 13) As at summer 1991 it has a dreary, run-down hotel, tending to reinforce point 8). 14) The hotel is called the Railview Hotel, implying that there is a railway line nearby - or at least that there used to be one prior to the Beeching reforms of the 1960s. Or it may overlook or have once overlooked a small private railway serving some local heavy industry, or a tram junction (thanks to maidofkent55 for these suggestions). It's also possibly near a busy road, since enough cars go by to hold Harry's attention quite late at night. 15) The area where the hotel is is at the edge of a large city. We are not told whether Cokeworth is the name of the city, or the name of a suburb or satellite-town on the edge of the city. However, the fact that the hotel's address is given simply as Railview Hotel, Cokeworth with no street-name, even though the hotel doesn't seem like the sort of place which would be widely famous, suggests that Cokeworth is a small enough place that everybody who lives there (or any post-owl likely to fly there) knows the address of an ordinary hotel. This in turn suggests that Cokeworth is the name of a small suburb or satellite town of the large city Harry can see stretching away in the darkness, rather than being the name of the city itself. This is reinforced by a reference on Pottermore describing Cokeworth as a "tiny Muggle town" - if you accept Pottermore as canon then the "big city" which can be seen from a hotel window in Cokeworth cannot itself be Cokeworth. 16) Some hours after coming away from the hotel, en route to Vernon's island, the family pass in apparently rapid succession a forest, a ploughed field and a suspension bridge. Given JKR's tendency to use locations from the West Country she knew as a teenager, this suggests the Forest of Dean and the Clifton Supension Bridge, which in turn suggests that the family may be heading north to south along the west side of England and that Cokeworth is in the north-west. Given the extent to which the Dursleys are weaving about, however, this can be seen only as a possible hint, not firm evidence. What would the house look like? The houses are almost certainly terraced - that is, joined to the houses on either side of them (what Americans call “row houses”). Many, probably most houses in Britain are, especially in poorer areas. [Snape's house is of course semi-detached - being at the end of a row.] The house itself is probably what's called a "two-up-and-two-down" - two rooms upstairs and two downstairs. This is a very common design for Victorian workers' housing. Cutaway of back-to-back housing in Leeds, from the Thoresby Society Some very poor traditional working-men’s houses were "back-to-backs" or "court houses", with no space at the back, the houses simply being built all of a piece with the ones behind them. However, back-to-backs were usually truly tiny, with only one room per floor – a combined kitchen/living-room on the ground floor, a bedroom on the first floor and a second bedroom either on a second floor or in the attic. These houses generally had no private lavatory and often not even a private water supply – they were often arranged around shared courts which would originally have had a communal lavatory-block and pump. They had stepped directly into a tiny sitting room, [HBP ch. #02; p. 28] [cut] a hidden door flew open, revealing a narrow staircase upon which a small man stood frozen. [cut] Wormtail [cut] turned and headed through a second hidden door. They heard banging, and a clinking of glasses. Within seconds he was back, bearing a dusty bottle and and three glasses upon a tray. [HBP ch. #02; p. 29] But Snape had got to his feet and strode to the small window, peered through the curtains at the deserted street [HBP ch. #02; p. 37] The fact that Snape’s house has a separate sitting-room and a kitchen, both on the same floor (Peter comes off the stairs into the sitting-room, then exits to what is presumably the kitchen through a different door, not back up the stairs, indicating there are two rooms on the ground floor), means it’s not a traditional one-room-per-floor back-to-back, and in any case this kind of housing was largely phased out by about 1940. Even if it was built as an unusually large back-to-back with two rooms per floor, both fronting the street (as they would have to, if there was no opening at the back), then you would probably expect a central staircase between, with the street door opening onto it – not straight into the front room. Alley between two rows of houses, showing back yards - forgot to note where I found this So Snape’s house is most likely a standard two-up-two-down, one room wide and two deep, with its own kitchen and water supply and a small garden or yard [note for American readers – a “yard” in Britain is something with a bare-earth, paved or concreted surface: if it’s grassed it’s a garden or a green] at the back to allow light into the rear rooms. There is likely to be a narrow alley between the yards of one row of houses and the yards of the houses behind them, with gates opening from the yards onto the alleyway. This would originally have been used to enable a horse and cart to deliver coal to each house, which would probably be stored in a concrete bunker in the yard. Andy Capp cartoon from the early 1960s, set in northern England Unless the houses have been modernized, they will have an outdoor lavatory in a small wooden or brick shed in the yard (which would probably be private, but might conceivably be shared with up to three other houses), and no bathroom. When Snape was a child, at any rate, the family would almost certainly have washed either standing at the kitchen sink or in a portable tin or zinc bath in front of the fire. They would probably also have had access to a commercial public bathhouse where they could get a proper hot bath or shower for a few pence. [This probably explains why Snape doesn't wash his hair every day, if in fact he doesn’t - he never got into the habit, and if he got ribbed at school for being scruffy it would become a point of pride not to do anything about it, just to be bloody-minded.] Lancashire 2up2downs - forgot to note where I found these Some two-up-two-downs have tiny front gardens, the width of the house and about four to eight feet deep, and more upmarket ones may even have a bay window on the downstairs front room. But we know Snape’s sitting-room has a small window, and Spinner’s End sounds like a very poor, basic street – so it’s much more likely that the houses front directly onto the pavement. Instead of two rows of back yards with an alley between, it's possible that there might be small back gardens, measly little scraps of grass extending back from the paved yards, with a common path running along the backs of all the houses and separating the yards from the gardens (I used to live on one of these in rural Kent). Whether the houses have any actual garden or not, there are very likely to be allotments. For those who don't know, this means that a nearby field will have been divided into garden-sized strips (allotments) which local residents can have the use of for a "peppercorn rent" - a few pounds a year. There is often a communal water-supply, and allotment-holders build sheds and grow flowers and vegetables on their strip of land, and the whole thing is a major social focus of the local community. We're told on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, but the way it's described is a stereotype of people's ideas of the industrial north of England. The two are not mutually exclusive, for the Midlands include Derby and extend right up to the edge of Sheffield. They border on the conurbation of Manchester, Stockport, Ashton-Under-Lyme and Stalybridge. All of these are generally regarded as northern cities. An idea of life in the industrial north of England, or of what a writer like JK Rowling might intend by setting a scene in the industrial north(ernish) of England, can be gained by ready the Andy Capp cartoons. Yes, they are a stereotype, but they're a stereotype written by somebody from the area and they typify how people think of the north, and what a writer is probably implying by invoking images of the north. In a forward to a 1975 Andy Capp album Reg Smythe, the series' cartoonist and writer, described the sort of house the Capps live in as "little terraced houses with an outside loo, one cold tap in the back kitchen where the walls are always wet, with windows that won't open and doors that won't close, and those freezing cold bedrooms where your breath comes out like a cloud of smoke". This, presumably, is the sort of thing JK Rowling had in mind. And in 1975, when Severus would have been fifteen, Smythe was still drawing Andy as bathing in a tin tub on the hearth.
They ate stale cornflakes and cold tinned tomatoes on toast for breakfast the next day. They had just finished when the owner of the hotel came over to their table. [cut] She held up a letter so they could read the green ink address:
'Wouldn't it be better just to go home, dear?' Aunt Petunia suggested timidly, hours later, but Uncle Vernon didn't seem to hear her. Exactly what he was looking for, none of them knew. He drove them into the middle of a forest, got out, looked around, shook his head, got back in the car and off they went again. The same thing happened in the middle of a ploughed field, halfway across a suspension bridge and at the top of a multi-storey car park. [PS ch. #03; p. 36]
Harry’s mother and Snape were childhood friends. Growing up in their tiny Muggle town of Cokeworth, they bonded over their magical powers like other kids do over toys. [Pottermore essay: The chapter that made us fall in love with… Severus Snape]
12) Cokeworth is a very long way from Surrey, since the Dursleys drive from just after Sunday breakfast until after a July nightfall to get there - albeit with a lot of weaving about and doubling back. This reinforces point 1).
13) As at summer 1991 it has a dreary, run-down hotel, tending to reinforce point 8).
14) The hotel is called the Railview Hotel, implying that there is a railway line nearby - or at least that there used to be one prior to the Beeching reforms of the 1960s. Or it may overlook or have once overlooked a small private railway serving some local heavy industry, or a tram junction (thanks to maidofkent55 for these suggestions). It's also possibly near a busy road, since enough cars go by to hold Harry's attention quite late at night.
15) The area where the hotel is is at the edge of a large city. We are not told whether Cokeworth is the name of the city, or the name of a suburb or satellite-town on the edge of the city. However, the fact that the hotel's address is given simply as Railview Hotel, Cokeworth with no street-name, even though the hotel doesn't seem like the sort of place which would be widely famous, suggests that Cokeworth is a small enough place that everybody who lives there (or any post-owl likely to fly there) knows the address of an ordinary hotel. This in turn suggests that Cokeworth is the name of a small suburb or satellite town of the large city Harry can see stretching away in the darkness, rather than being the name of the city itself. This is reinforced by a reference on Pottermore describing Cokeworth as a "tiny Muggle town" - if you accept Pottermore as canon then the "big city" which can be seen from a hotel window in Cokeworth cannot itself be Cokeworth.
16) Some hours after coming away from the hotel, en route to Vernon's island, the family pass in apparently rapid succession a forest, a ploughed field and a suspension bridge. Given JKR's tendency to use locations from the West Country she knew as a teenager, this suggests the Forest of Dean and the Clifton Supension Bridge, which in turn suggests that the family may be heading north to south along the west side of England and that Cokeworth is in the north-west. Given the extent to which the Dursleys are weaving about, however, this can be seen only as a possible hint, not firm evidence.
The houses are almost certainly terraced - that is, joined to the houses on either side of them (what Americans call “row houses”). Many, probably most houses in Britain are, especially in poorer areas. [Snape's house is of course semi-detached - being at the end of a row.] The house itself is probably what's called a "two-up-and-two-down" - two rooms upstairs and two downstairs. This is a very common design for Victorian workers' housing.
Some very poor traditional working-men’s houses were "back-to-backs" or "court houses", with no space at the back, the houses simply being built all of a piece with the ones behind them. However, back-to-backs were usually truly tiny, with only one room per floor – a combined kitchen/living-room on the ground floor, a bedroom on the first floor and a second bedroom either on a second floor or in the attic. These houses generally had no private lavatory and often not even a private water supply – they were often arranged around shared courts which would originally have had a communal lavatory-block and pump.
[cut] a hidden door flew open, revealing a narrow staircase upon which a small man stood frozen. [cut] Wormtail [cut] turned and headed through a second hidden door. They heard banging, and a clinking of glasses. Within seconds he was back, bearing a dusty bottle and and three glasses upon a tray. [HBP ch. #02; p. 29]
But Snape had got to his feet and strode to the small window, peered through the curtains at the deserted street [HBP ch. #02; p. 37]
The fact that Snape’s house has a separate sitting-room and a kitchen, both on the same floor (Peter comes off the stairs into the sitting-room, then exits to what is presumably the kitchen through a different door, not back up the stairs, indicating there are two rooms on the ground floor), means it’s not a traditional one-room-per-floor back-to-back, and in any case this kind of housing was largely phased out by about 1940. Even if it was built as an unusually large back-to-back with two rooms per floor, both fronting the street (as they would have to, if there was no opening at the back), then you would probably expect a central staircase between, with the street door opening onto it – not straight into the front room.
Unless the houses have been modernized, they will have an outdoor lavatory in a small wooden or brick shed in the yard (which would probably be private, but might conceivably be shared with up to three other houses), and no bathroom. When Snape was a child, at any rate, the family would almost certainly have washed either standing at the kitchen sink or in a portable tin or zinc bath in front of the fire. They would probably also have had access to a commercial public bathhouse where they could get a proper hot bath or shower for a few pence. [This probably explains why Snape doesn't wash his hair every day, if in fact he doesn’t - he never got into the habit, and if he got ribbed at school for being scruffy it would become a point of pride not to do anything about it, just to be bloody-minded.]
Some two-up-two-downs have tiny front gardens, the width of the house and about four to eight feet deep, and more upmarket ones may even have a bay window on the downstairs front room. But we know Snape’s sitting-room has a small window, and Spinner’s End sounds like a very poor, basic street – so it’s much more likely that the houses front directly onto the pavement.
Instead of two rows of back yards with an alley between, it's possible that there might be small back gardens, measly little scraps of grass extending back from the paved yards, with a common path running along the backs of all the houses and separating the yards from the gardens (I used to live on one of these in rural Kent). Whether the houses have any actual garden or not, there are very likely to be allotments. For those who don't know, this means that a nearby field will have been divided into garden-sized strips (allotments) which local residents can have the use of for a "peppercorn rent" - a few pounds a year. There is often a communal water-supply, and allotment-holders build sheds and grow flowers and vegetables on their strip of land, and the whole thing is a major social focus of the local community.
We're told on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, but the way it's described is a stereotype of people's ideas of the industrial north of England. The two are not mutually exclusive, for the Midlands include Derby and extend right up to the edge of Sheffield. They border on the conurbation of Manchester, Stockport, Ashton-Under-Lyme and Stalybridge. All of these are generally regarded as northern cities.
An idea of life in the industrial north of England, or of what a writer like JK Rowling might intend by setting a scene in the industrial north(ernish) of England, can be gained by ready the Andy Capp cartoons. Yes, they are a stereotype, but they're a stereotype written by somebody from the area and they typify how people think of the north, and what a writer is probably implying by invoking images of the north. In a forward to a 1975 Andy Capp album Reg Smythe, the series' cartoonist and writer, described the sort of house the Capps live in as "little terraced houses with an outside loo, one cold tap in the back kitchen where the walls are always wet, with windows that won't open and doors that won't close, and those freezing cold bedrooms where your breath comes out like a cloud of smoke". This, presumably, is the sort of thing JK Rowling had in mind.
And in 1975, when Severus would have been fifteen, Smythe was still drawing Andy as bathing in a tin tub on the hearth.
The playground near Spinner's End where Severus met Lily circa 1969, btw, would probably have had very plain swings and a roundabout like these, plus a basic slide and possibly a seesaw (what Americans call a teeter-totter). The swings might well have half their seats made with wooden backs and sides and a safety-bar across the lap, as shown here, for use by smaller children, and half with plain seats.
Snape set his glass down upon the table and sat back again, his hands upon the arms of his chair, [cut] 'A hundred reasons!' [Bellatrix] said loudly, striding out from behind the sofa to slam her glass upon the table. [HBP ch. #02; p. 30-31]
We know that Snape's house is at the end of a row. The sitting-room at least is very small (although big enough to hold an armchair and sofa), and the street-door opens directly into the sitting-room. The sitting-room has a small window. It has an internal door leading to a narrow staircase; a second internal door leads to the kitchen but it is ambiguous whether this is a separate door off the sitting-room, or a second door accessed through the staircase door. Upstairs there are at least two bedrooms.
We are told that the sitting-room is “tiny”. It contains an armchair and a sofa, facing each other across a table: most likely a low coffee-table, although that isn't specified. They seem to be grouped very close together – Snape is able to lean forward from the armchair and place his glass on the table without getting up. There is space between the sofa and the wall/bookcases, since Bellatrix stands behind it. Seated in the armchair, Snape has his back towards the wall in which the stair-door is situated. Although we aren’t told it there is probably a fireplace, and the armchair and sofa are either side of it.
It's a reasonable surmise that all the rooms are small, incidentally, not just the sitting room: a tiny sitting-room (and evidently no bigger or better public room in which to entertain guests) implies a generally very small house. The kitchen might be the same size as the sitting room, or it might be smaller – but it might also be a bit larger, since it was common in such households to use the kitchen as a living-room and retain the front room as a “parlour” to be used only on special occasions.
When the stair-door opens we’re told it “reveals” a narrow stair with Wormtail standing on it, which presumably means that somebody in the room can see both the stair and Peter (unless it’s a God’s-eye view). Snape can’t, because he has his back to the door. Peter comes a little way into the room, then he goes out through a second door to the kitchen. The information about the kitchen door is ambiguous. When I lived in a two-up-two-down in Kent in the 1980s, there was the sitting-room at the front and the kitchen at the back, and the staircase was in between them. It had a tiny hall about three foot long and thirty inches wide at the foot of the stairs, and this had doors into both the sitting-room and kitchen. [This Kent house, though tiny, had an open-ended yard leading to a substantial garden on the far side of the back lane - but that would be unlikely in a town as built-up as the area around Spinner's End seems to be.] It’s possible that the Snape house is arranged in this way, and that when Wormtail enters the kitchen through a second door, he goes back through the still-open first door into a hall at the foot of the stairs, and thence through a second door into the kitchen. However, with this floor-plan it’s difficult to arrange matters so that anyone in the sitting-room could actually see Wormtail on the stair, which is effectively tucked round a corner from the point of view of anyone not standing directly at the stair’s foot. Also we are told that he exits through a second hidden door, which implies that it’s another door concealed behind a bookcase – not just concealed by the first door. If we place the stair at the side of the house rather than in the middle, it makes for a more complex layout, and creates a new problem. It is clear from the usual layout of small two-up-two-downs, with the front door to one side of the house with no window above it, and two windows at the other side one above the other with no space between them and the wall of the house next door, that if the stair is placed at the side of the house it usually begins right behind the front door. If this were the case at Snape’s house the front door would open onto the staircase, not right into the living-room. Typical Belfast 2up2down with "return" at back, from Ulster Architectural Heritage Society Wide 2up2downs in County Durham, from Homemaker.co.uk However, if we have a stair which is placed to one side and which turns a corner at the bottom, so that it faces crosswise into the sitting-room, rather than towards the front or back of the building then we can have it so that when the door onto the stair is opened, people in the room can actually see the first few steps, with Wormtail on them. Two-up-two-downs with space at the side of the windows, where there might possibly be a narrow stair, do exist, although they are less common than the very narrow kind. This arrangement allows Peter to be standing on the stair and yet be visible to people inside the sitting-room, and to reach the kitchen through a separate internal door, other than the stair door. Larger houses based on the two-up-two-down design also exist: in Belfast apparently it is common for such houses to have a "return", an extension at the back which adds two more rooms, at the cost of half the yard. However, such a house has the same problem as the one with the central stair: the staircase must be fairly central, since it has to be accessible from rooms at front, centre and back of the house, and it then becomes difficult to arrange matters so that Wormtail could be visible to someone in the sitting-room whilst standing on the stairs, and so that the stair and the kitchen could both be accessed from the sitting-room through hidden doors. When rooms are grouped around a hall, they normally open into that hall, not into each other. If you need to write the Snape family with a house of more than four rooms (plus attic), however, this is the sort of thing that would be feasible: with or without the tiny front-garden and bay window. You would have to assume that the foot of the stairs was obliquely visible through the door leading from the sitting-room to the hall, and that the kitchen door was "hidden" in the sense that it was at an angle which prevented its being seen. In truth, however, such a house would most likely be too large and upmarket for such a very poor, run-down area as Spinner's End appears to be, and more substantial houses of this kind would probably have already been tarted-up and re-sold by 1996 (by 2000 even scruffy little four-room houses were being Yuppified). 'You and that boy have been sneaking in my room!' [DH ch. #33; p. 537] But the Evanses might well have lived in such a house, with the scullery (not the third bedroom, because Tuney accuses Lily and Severus of "sneaking in my room", so the family must have at least three bedrooms) converted into an indoor bathroom, and perhaps with a proper garden out the back. If a tiny four-room house of the type I have suggested for the Snapes were to be converted to add a bathroom, this would probably be done by dividing the smaller bedroom on the first floor into a small bathroom plus an extended landing with space for steps up to a loft-conversion bedroom in the attic. The attic room might have a dormer window, or just a skylight set flush into the roof. Alternatively, the main bedroom might be divided and part of it used for a bathroom, resulting in an upper floor with one medium and one small bedroom and a tiny bathroom, instead of one large and one medium bedroom, although this would probably result in either the bathroom or the new small bedroom having no window and no exterior wall. Or, of course, a bathroom could simply be added in wizard-space, with a door off the existing small landing. N.B. Any of these suggested layouts could of course be mirror-reversed, and the back doors may be on either side of the kitchen relative to the front door, and the lavvies and coal bunkers on either side of the yards so long as they don't obstruct the kitchen door and back gate. Where is it? If you accept Pottermore as canon then we now know that Spinner's End is in the Midlands. This is a roughly oblong band of country which stretches diagonally across the middle of England, from the Welsh borders to the North Sea, bounded roughly by Ross-on-Wye in the south-west corner, Oswestry in the north-west, the southern edge of Cleethorpes in the north-east and Holbeach in the south-east. We aren’t told what sort of mill the disused mill near Spinner’s End is. The real Spinner's End is actually in a steel-mill area, which suggests the Black Country near Birmingham (which is in the Midlands), or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the "spinner" reference to mean that the mill is a textile mill, which is probably the most common kind of disused, ex-industrial mill, there are several possibilities. The British textile industry, most of which had died by the 1950s, centred around wool in Yorkshire and Lanarkshire, jute in the Dundee area, silk and linen in Fife and cotton in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lanarkshire and Nottinghamshire - also silk in Derby and some parts of Lancashire and lace in Nottingham and in some areas of Ireland and Scotland. There was also a mixture of textile factories in Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Linen-mills occurred widely throughout Britain, and there were numerous tweed and hosiery mills at Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Of these, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire fall within the Midlands, so we're looking at cotton, silk or lace and maybe linen, but probably not wool or jute. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Also, the little mill-towns there aren't close enough to a city to count as being on the outskirts of it. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would be possible in theory, since at one point it was full of mills and estates of working men's cottages. However, most of those cottages were pulled down by 1977, which reduces Derby's chances of being the right place, and most of Derby is in any case too clean and too pretty. There are however a series of little mill-towns in and around Hope Valley, strung out on a line between Derby and Manchester, some in the Midlands and some over the border into Lancashire and Cheshire, and some of which are suitably poor and scruffy. Of these, however, only Bredbury seems to have a matching history - it used to have paper mills and a sludge works - and even there, improvements began in 1966. The scruffier towns in the area also tend to be too far out from the city. However, Cokeworth doesn't have to be an alternative name for a real place - it can be a fictional town on the edge between Derbyshire and Manchester, just that bit sadder and more run-down than the ones which are really there. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Cokeworth is on the very outskirts of the city which Harry sees from the window of the Railview Hotel, then Manchester is a good candidate, with Cokeworth being placed just over the border into Derbyshire. Manchester is actually known as "the town of tall chimneys," and the paintings of LS Lowry, which have come to typify the northern English industrial townscape, are mainly of the Salford/Manchester area. [I’ve been told that JK actually said on an arts programme that she is a big fan of Lowry's, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.] "Lancashire Scene 1925" by LS Lowry, from Anthony Seaton\'s Lowry educational site Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background (and the fact that it's specified as in Lancashire and therefore slightly too far north accordinbg to Pottermore), Lowry’s “Lancashire Street Scene 1925” could be Snape's house in Spinner's End – so much so that I wonder if JK was inspired by this particular drawing. If that mill near Spinner's End is actually a steel mill then Birmingham or Sheffield are good candidates for the city near Cokeworth, or possibly the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation, which is mainly concerned with ceramics but has had some steel works in the past. It must be that Cokeworth is a satellite town or suburb, rather than the city itself, because even aside from the business about the hotel, if it was part of a thousand-year-old city (and most of them are that old, or older) it's unlikely Bella and Cissy could be the first pure-bloods to set foot there, or even think that they were. Of course, Bella could just be being her usual bigoted self - but if she really means it she's more likely to be talking about some purpose-built little late Georgian or Victorian mill-town, floating about the edge of a major industrial zone such as Manchester or Birmingham. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated. The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive. However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world. If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin. The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas. Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
The information about the kitchen door is ambiguous. When I lived in a two-up-two-down in Kent in the 1980s, there was the sitting-room at the front and the kitchen at the back, and the staircase was in between them. It had a tiny hall about three foot long and thirty inches wide at the foot of the stairs, and this had doors into both the sitting-room and kitchen.
[This Kent house, though tiny, had an open-ended yard leading to a substantial garden on the far side of the back lane - but that would be unlikely in a town as built-up as the area around Spinner's End seems to be.]
It’s possible that the Snape house is arranged in this way, and that when Wormtail enters the kitchen through a second door, he goes back through the still-open first door into a hall at the foot of the stairs, and thence through a second door into the kitchen. However, with this floor-plan it’s difficult to arrange matters so that anyone in the sitting-room could actually see Wormtail on the stair, which is effectively tucked round a corner from the point of view of anyone not standing directly at the stair’s foot. Also we are told that he exits through a second hidden door, which implies that it’s another door concealed behind a bookcase – not just concealed by the first door. If we place the stair at the side of the house rather than in the middle, it makes for a more complex layout, and creates a new problem. It is clear from the usual layout of small two-up-two-downs, with the front door to one side of the house with no window above it, and two windows at the other side one above the other with no space between them and the wall of the house next door, that if the stair is placed at the side of the house it usually begins right behind the front door. If this were the case at Snape’s house the front door would open onto the staircase, not right into the living-room. Typical Belfast 2up2down with "return" at back, from Ulster Architectural Heritage Society Wide 2up2downs in County Durham, from Homemaker.co.uk However, if we have a stair which is placed to one side and which turns a corner at the bottom, so that it faces crosswise into the sitting-room, rather than towards the front or back of the building then we can have it so that when the door onto the stair is opened, people in the room can actually see the first few steps, with Wormtail on them. Two-up-two-downs with space at the side of the windows, where there might possibly be a narrow stair, do exist, although they are less common than the very narrow kind. This arrangement allows Peter to be standing on the stair and yet be visible to people inside the sitting-room, and to reach the kitchen through a separate internal door, other than the stair door. Larger houses based on the two-up-two-down design also exist: in Belfast apparently it is common for such houses to have a "return", an extension at the back which adds two more rooms, at the cost of half the yard. However, such a house has the same problem as the one with the central stair: the staircase must be fairly central, since it has to be accessible from rooms at front, centre and back of the house, and it then becomes difficult to arrange matters so that Wormtail could be visible to someone in the sitting-room whilst standing on the stairs, and so that the stair and the kitchen could both be accessed from the sitting-room through hidden doors. When rooms are grouped around a hall, they normally open into that hall, not into each other. If you need to write the Snape family with a house of more than four rooms (plus attic), however, this is the sort of thing that would be feasible: with or without the tiny front-garden and bay window. You would have to assume that the foot of the stairs was obliquely visible through the door leading from the sitting-room to the hall, and that the kitchen door was "hidden" in the sense that it was at an angle which prevented its being seen. In truth, however, such a house would most likely be too large and upmarket for such a very poor, run-down area as Spinner's End appears to be, and more substantial houses of this kind would probably have already been tarted-up and re-sold by 1996 (by 2000 even scruffy little four-room houses were being Yuppified). 'You and that boy have been sneaking in my room!' [DH ch. #33; p. 537] But the Evanses might well have lived in such a house, with the scullery (not the third bedroom, because Tuney accuses Lily and Severus of "sneaking in my room", so the family must have at least three bedrooms) converted into an indoor bathroom, and perhaps with a proper garden out the back. If a tiny four-room house of the type I have suggested for the Snapes were to be converted to add a bathroom, this would probably be done by dividing the smaller bedroom on the first floor into a small bathroom plus an extended landing with space for steps up to a loft-conversion bedroom in the attic. The attic room might have a dormer window, or just a skylight set flush into the roof. Alternatively, the main bedroom might be divided and part of it used for a bathroom, resulting in an upper floor with one medium and one small bedroom and a tiny bathroom, instead of one large and one medium bedroom, although this would probably result in either the bathroom or the new small bedroom having no window and no exterior wall. Or, of course, a bathroom could simply be added in wizard-space, with a door off the existing small landing. N.B. Any of these suggested layouts could of course be mirror-reversed, and the back doors may be on either side of the kitchen relative to the front door, and the lavvies and coal bunkers on either side of the yards so long as they don't obstruct the kitchen door and back gate. Where is it? If you accept Pottermore as canon then we now know that Spinner's End is in the Midlands. This is a roughly oblong band of country which stretches diagonally across the middle of England, from the Welsh borders to the North Sea, bounded roughly by Ross-on-Wye in the south-west corner, Oswestry in the north-west, the southern edge of Cleethorpes in the north-east and Holbeach in the south-east. We aren’t told what sort of mill the disused mill near Spinner’s End is. The real Spinner's End is actually in a steel-mill area, which suggests the Black Country near Birmingham (which is in the Midlands), or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the "spinner" reference to mean that the mill is a textile mill, which is probably the most common kind of disused, ex-industrial mill, there are several possibilities. The British textile industry, most of which had died by the 1950s, centred around wool in Yorkshire and Lanarkshire, jute in the Dundee area, silk and linen in Fife and cotton in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lanarkshire and Nottinghamshire - also silk in Derby and some parts of Lancashire and lace in Nottingham and in some areas of Ireland and Scotland. There was also a mixture of textile factories in Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Linen-mills occurred widely throughout Britain, and there were numerous tweed and hosiery mills at Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Of these, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire fall within the Midlands, so we're looking at cotton, silk or lace and maybe linen, but probably not wool or jute. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Also, the little mill-towns there aren't close enough to a city to count as being on the outskirts of it. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would be possible in theory, since at one point it was full of mills and estates of working men's cottages. However, most of those cottages were pulled down by 1977, which reduces Derby's chances of being the right place, and most of Derby is in any case too clean and too pretty. There are however a series of little mill-towns in and around Hope Valley, strung out on a line between Derby and Manchester, some in the Midlands and some over the border into Lancashire and Cheshire, and some of which are suitably poor and scruffy. Of these, however, only Bredbury seems to have a matching history - it used to have paper mills and a sludge works - and even there, improvements began in 1966. The scruffier towns in the area also tend to be too far out from the city. However, Cokeworth doesn't have to be an alternative name for a real place - it can be a fictional town on the edge between Derbyshire and Manchester, just that bit sadder and more run-down than the ones which are really there. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Cokeworth is on the very outskirts of the city which Harry sees from the window of the Railview Hotel, then Manchester is a good candidate, with Cokeworth being placed just over the border into Derbyshire. Manchester is actually known as "the town of tall chimneys," and the paintings of LS Lowry, which have come to typify the northern English industrial townscape, are mainly of the Salford/Manchester area. [I’ve been told that JK actually said on an arts programme that she is a big fan of Lowry's, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.] "Lancashire Scene 1925" by LS Lowry, from Anthony Seaton\'s Lowry educational site Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background (and the fact that it's specified as in Lancashire and therefore slightly too far north accordinbg to Pottermore), Lowry’s “Lancashire Street Scene 1925” could be Snape's house in Spinner's End – so much so that I wonder if JK was inspired by this particular drawing. If that mill near Spinner's End is actually a steel mill then Birmingham or Sheffield are good candidates for the city near Cokeworth, or possibly the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation, which is mainly concerned with ceramics but has had some steel works in the past. It must be that Cokeworth is a satellite town or suburb, rather than the city itself, because even aside from the business about the hotel, if it was part of a thousand-year-old city (and most of them are that old, or older) it's unlikely Bella and Cissy could be the first pure-bloods to set foot there, or even think that they were. Of course, Bella could just be being her usual bigoted self - but if she really means it she's more likely to be talking about some purpose-built little late Georgian or Victorian mill-town, floating about the edge of a major industrial zone such as Manchester or Birmingham. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated. The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive. However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world. If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin. The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas. Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
If we place the stair at the side of the house rather than in the middle, it makes for a more complex layout, and creates a new problem. It is clear from the usual layout of small two-up-two-downs, with the front door to one side of the house with no window above it, and two windows at the other side one above the other with no space between them and the wall of the house next door, that if the stair is placed at the side of the house it usually begins right behind the front door. If this were the case at Snape’s house the front door would open onto the staircase, not right into the living-room. Typical Belfast 2up2down with "return" at back, from Ulster Architectural Heritage Society Wide 2up2downs in County Durham, from Homemaker.co.uk However, if we have a stair which is placed to one side and which turns a corner at the bottom, so that it faces crosswise into the sitting-room, rather than towards the front or back of the building then we can have it so that when the door onto the stair is opened, people in the room can actually see the first few steps, with Wormtail on them. Two-up-two-downs with space at the side of the windows, where there might possibly be a narrow stair, do exist, although they are less common than the very narrow kind. This arrangement allows Peter to be standing on the stair and yet be visible to people inside the sitting-room, and to reach the kitchen through a separate internal door, other than the stair door. Larger houses based on the two-up-two-down design also exist: in Belfast apparently it is common for such houses to have a "return", an extension at the back which adds two more rooms, at the cost of half the yard. However, such a house has the same problem as the one with the central stair: the staircase must be fairly central, since it has to be accessible from rooms at front, centre and back of the house, and it then becomes difficult to arrange matters so that Wormtail could be visible to someone in the sitting-room whilst standing on the stairs, and so that the stair and the kitchen could both be accessed from the sitting-room through hidden doors. When rooms are grouped around a hall, they normally open into that hall, not into each other. If you need to write the Snape family with a house of more than four rooms (plus attic), however, this is the sort of thing that would be feasible: with or without the tiny front-garden and bay window. You would have to assume that the foot of the stairs was obliquely visible through the door leading from the sitting-room to the hall, and that the kitchen door was "hidden" in the sense that it was at an angle which prevented its being seen. In truth, however, such a house would most likely be too large and upmarket for such a very poor, run-down area as Spinner's End appears to be, and more substantial houses of this kind would probably have already been tarted-up and re-sold by 1996 (by 2000 even scruffy little four-room houses were being Yuppified). 'You and that boy have been sneaking in my room!' [DH ch. #33; p. 537] But the Evanses might well have lived in such a house, with the scullery (not the third bedroom, because Tuney accuses Lily and Severus of "sneaking in my room", so the family must have at least three bedrooms) converted into an indoor bathroom, and perhaps with a proper garden out the back. If a tiny four-room house of the type I have suggested for the Snapes were to be converted to add a bathroom, this would probably be done by dividing the smaller bedroom on the first floor into a small bathroom plus an extended landing with space for steps up to a loft-conversion bedroom in the attic. The attic room might have a dormer window, or just a skylight set flush into the roof. Alternatively, the main bedroom might be divided and part of it used for a bathroom, resulting in an upper floor with one medium and one small bedroom and a tiny bathroom, instead of one large and one medium bedroom, although this would probably result in either the bathroom or the new small bedroom having no window and no exterior wall. Or, of course, a bathroom could simply be added in wizard-space, with a door off the existing small landing. N.B. Any of these suggested layouts could of course be mirror-reversed, and the back doors may be on either side of the kitchen relative to the front door, and the lavvies and coal bunkers on either side of the yards so long as they don't obstruct the kitchen door and back gate. Where is it? If you accept Pottermore as canon then we now know that Spinner's End is in the Midlands. This is a roughly oblong band of country which stretches diagonally across the middle of England, from the Welsh borders to the North Sea, bounded roughly by Ross-on-Wye in the south-west corner, Oswestry in the north-west, the southern edge of Cleethorpes in the north-east and Holbeach in the south-east. We aren’t told what sort of mill the disused mill near Spinner’s End is. The real Spinner's End is actually in a steel-mill area, which suggests the Black Country near Birmingham (which is in the Midlands), or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the "spinner" reference to mean that the mill is a textile mill, which is probably the most common kind of disused, ex-industrial mill, there are several possibilities. The British textile industry, most of which had died by the 1950s, centred around wool in Yorkshire and Lanarkshire, jute in the Dundee area, silk and linen in Fife and cotton in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lanarkshire and Nottinghamshire - also silk in Derby and some parts of Lancashire and lace in Nottingham and in some areas of Ireland and Scotland. There was also a mixture of textile factories in Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Linen-mills occurred widely throughout Britain, and there were numerous tweed and hosiery mills at Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Of these, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire fall within the Midlands, so we're looking at cotton, silk or lace and maybe linen, but probably not wool or jute. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Also, the little mill-towns there aren't close enough to a city to count as being on the outskirts of it. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would be possible in theory, since at one point it was full of mills and estates of working men's cottages. However, most of those cottages were pulled down by 1977, which reduces Derby's chances of being the right place, and most of Derby is in any case too clean and too pretty. There are however a series of little mill-towns in and around Hope Valley, strung out on a line between Derby and Manchester, some in the Midlands and some over the border into Lancashire and Cheshire, and some of which are suitably poor and scruffy. Of these, however, only Bredbury seems to have a matching history - it used to have paper mills and a sludge works - and even there, improvements began in 1966. The scruffier towns in the area also tend to be too far out from the city. However, Cokeworth doesn't have to be an alternative name for a real place - it can be a fictional town on the edge between Derbyshire and Manchester, just that bit sadder and more run-down than the ones which are really there. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Cokeworth is on the very outskirts of the city which Harry sees from the window of the Railview Hotel, then Manchester is a good candidate, with Cokeworth being placed just over the border into Derbyshire. Manchester is actually known as "the town of tall chimneys," and the paintings of LS Lowry, which have come to typify the northern English industrial townscape, are mainly of the Salford/Manchester area. [I’ve been told that JK actually said on an arts programme that she is a big fan of Lowry's, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.] "Lancashire Scene 1925" by LS Lowry, from Anthony Seaton\'s Lowry educational site Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background (and the fact that it's specified as in Lancashire and therefore slightly too far north accordinbg to Pottermore), Lowry’s “Lancashire Street Scene 1925” could be Snape's house in Spinner's End – so much so that I wonder if JK was inspired by this particular drawing. If that mill near Spinner's End is actually a steel mill then Birmingham or Sheffield are good candidates for the city near Cokeworth, or possibly the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation, which is mainly concerned with ceramics but has had some steel works in the past. It must be that Cokeworth is a satellite town or suburb, rather than the city itself, because even aside from the business about the hotel, if it was part of a thousand-year-old city (and most of them are that old, or older) it's unlikely Bella and Cissy could be the first pure-bloods to set foot there, or even think that they were. Of course, Bella could just be being her usual bigoted self - but if she really means it she's more likely to be talking about some purpose-built little late Georgian or Victorian mill-town, floating about the edge of a major industrial zone such as Manchester or Birmingham. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated. The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive. However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world. If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin. The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas. Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
However, if we have a stair which is placed to one side and which turns a corner at the bottom, so that it faces crosswise into the sitting-room, rather than towards the front or back of the building then we can have it so that when the door onto the stair is opened, people in the room can actually see the first few steps, with Wormtail on them.
Two-up-two-downs with space at the side of the windows, where there might possibly be a narrow stair, do exist, although they are less common than the very narrow kind. This arrangement allows Peter to be standing on the stair and yet be visible to people inside the sitting-room, and to reach the kitchen through a separate internal door, other than the stair door.
Larger houses based on the two-up-two-down design also exist: in Belfast apparently it is common for such houses to have a "return", an extension at the back which adds two more rooms, at the cost of half the yard. However, such a house has the same problem as the one with the central stair: the staircase must be fairly central, since it has to be accessible from rooms at front, centre and back of the house, and it then becomes difficult to arrange matters so that Wormtail could be visible to someone in the sitting-room whilst standing on the stairs, and so that the stair and the kitchen could both be accessed from the sitting-room through hidden doors. When rooms are grouped around a hall, they normally open into that hall, not into each other.
If you need to write the Snape family with a house of more than four rooms (plus attic), however, this is the sort of thing that would be feasible: with or without the tiny front-garden and bay window. You would have to assume that the foot of the stairs was obliquely visible through the door leading from the sitting-room to the hall, and that the kitchen door was "hidden" in the sense that it was at an angle which prevented its being seen. In truth, however, such a house would most likely be too large and upmarket for such a very poor, run-down area as Spinner's End appears to be, and more substantial houses of this kind would probably have already been tarted-up and re-sold by 1996 (by 2000 even scruffy little four-room houses were being Yuppified). 'You and that boy have been sneaking in my room!' [DH ch. #33; p. 537] But the Evanses might well have lived in such a house, with the scullery (not the third bedroom, because Tuney accuses Lily and Severus of "sneaking in my room", so the family must have at least three bedrooms) converted into an indoor bathroom, and perhaps with a proper garden out the back. If a tiny four-room house of the type I have suggested for the Snapes were to be converted to add a bathroom, this would probably be done by dividing the smaller bedroom on the first floor into a small bathroom plus an extended landing with space for steps up to a loft-conversion bedroom in the attic. The attic room might have a dormer window, or just a skylight set flush into the roof. Alternatively, the main bedroom might be divided and part of it used for a bathroom, resulting in an upper floor with one medium and one small bedroom and a tiny bathroom, instead of one large and one medium bedroom, although this would probably result in either the bathroom or the new small bedroom having no window and no exterior wall. Or, of course, a bathroom could simply be added in wizard-space, with a door off the existing small landing. N.B. Any of these suggested layouts could of course be mirror-reversed, and the back doors may be on either side of the kitchen relative to the front door, and the lavvies and coal bunkers on either side of the yards so long as they don't obstruct the kitchen door and back gate. Where is it? If you accept Pottermore as canon then we now know that Spinner's End is in the Midlands. This is a roughly oblong band of country which stretches diagonally across the middle of England, from the Welsh borders to the North Sea, bounded roughly by Ross-on-Wye in the south-west corner, Oswestry in the north-west, the southern edge of Cleethorpes in the north-east and Holbeach in the south-east. We aren’t told what sort of mill the disused mill near Spinner’s End is. The real Spinner's End is actually in a steel-mill area, which suggests the Black Country near Birmingham (which is in the Midlands), or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the "spinner" reference to mean that the mill is a textile mill, which is probably the most common kind of disused, ex-industrial mill, there are several possibilities. The British textile industry, most of which had died by the 1950s, centred around wool in Yorkshire and Lanarkshire, jute in the Dundee area, silk and linen in Fife and cotton in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lanarkshire and Nottinghamshire - also silk in Derby and some parts of Lancashire and lace in Nottingham and in some areas of Ireland and Scotland. There was also a mixture of textile factories in Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Linen-mills occurred widely throughout Britain, and there were numerous tweed and hosiery mills at Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Of these, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire fall within the Midlands, so we're looking at cotton, silk or lace and maybe linen, but probably not wool or jute. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Also, the little mill-towns there aren't close enough to a city to count as being on the outskirts of it. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would be possible in theory, since at one point it was full of mills and estates of working men's cottages. However, most of those cottages were pulled down by 1977, which reduces Derby's chances of being the right place, and most of Derby is in any case too clean and too pretty. There are however a series of little mill-towns in and around Hope Valley, strung out on a line between Derby and Manchester, some in the Midlands and some over the border into Lancashire and Cheshire, and some of which are suitably poor and scruffy. Of these, however, only Bredbury seems to have a matching history - it used to have paper mills and a sludge works - and even there, improvements began in 1966. The scruffier towns in the area also tend to be too far out from the city. However, Cokeworth doesn't have to be an alternative name for a real place - it can be a fictional town on the edge between Derbyshire and Manchester, just that bit sadder and more run-down than the ones which are really there. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Cokeworth is on the very outskirts of the city which Harry sees from the window of the Railview Hotel, then Manchester is a good candidate, with Cokeworth being placed just over the border into Derbyshire. Manchester is actually known as "the town of tall chimneys," and the paintings of LS Lowry, which have come to typify the northern English industrial townscape, are mainly of the Salford/Manchester area. [I’ve been told that JK actually said on an arts programme that she is a big fan of Lowry's, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.] "Lancashire Scene 1925" by LS Lowry, from Anthony Seaton\'s Lowry educational site Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background (and the fact that it's specified as in Lancashire and therefore slightly too far north accordinbg to Pottermore), Lowry’s “Lancashire Street Scene 1925” could be Snape's house in Spinner's End – so much so that I wonder if JK was inspired by this particular drawing. If that mill near Spinner's End is actually a steel mill then Birmingham or Sheffield are good candidates for the city near Cokeworth, or possibly the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation, which is mainly concerned with ceramics but has had some steel works in the past. It must be that Cokeworth is a satellite town or suburb, rather than the city itself, because even aside from the business about the hotel, if it was part of a thousand-year-old city (and most of them are that old, or older) it's unlikely Bella and Cissy could be the first pure-bloods to set foot there, or even think that they were. Of course, Bella could just be being her usual bigoted self - but if she really means it she's more likely to be talking about some purpose-built little late Georgian or Victorian mill-town, floating about the edge of a major industrial zone such as Manchester or Birmingham. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated. The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive. However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world. If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin. The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas. Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
In truth, however, such a house would most likely be too large and upmarket for such a very poor, run-down area as Spinner's End appears to be, and more substantial houses of this kind would probably have already been tarted-up and re-sold by 1996 (by 2000 even scruffy little four-room houses were being Yuppified). 'You and that boy have been sneaking in my room!' [DH ch. #33; p. 537] But the Evanses might well have lived in such a house, with the scullery (not the third bedroom, because Tuney accuses Lily and Severus of "sneaking in my room", so the family must have at least three bedrooms) converted into an indoor bathroom, and perhaps with a proper garden out the back. If a tiny four-room house of the type I have suggested for the Snapes were to be converted to add a bathroom, this would probably be done by dividing the smaller bedroom on the first floor into a small bathroom plus an extended landing with space for steps up to a loft-conversion bedroom in the attic. The attic room might have a dormer window, or just a skylight set flush into the roof. Alternatively, the main bedroom might be divided and part of it used for a bathroom, resulting in an upper floor with one medium and one small bedroom and a tiny bathroom, instead of one large and one medium bedroom, although this would probably result in either the bathroom or the new small bedroom having no window and no exterior wall. Or, of course, a bathroom could simply be added in wizard-space, with a door off the existing small landing. N.B. Any of these suggested layouts could of course be mirror-reversed, and the back doors may be on either side of the kitchen relative to the front door, and the lavvies and coal bunkers on either side of the yards so long as they don't obstruct the kitchen door and back gate. Where is it? If you accept Pottermore as canon then we now know that Spinner's End is in the Midlands. This is a roughly oblong band of country which stretches diagonally across the middle of England, from the Welsh borders to the North Sea, bounded roughly by Ross-on-Wye in the south-west corner, Oswestry in the north-west, the southern edge of Cleethorpes in the north-east and Holbeach in the south-east. We aren’t told what sort of mill the disused mill near Spinner’s End is. The real Spinner's End is actually in a steel-mill area, which suggests the Black Country near Birmingham (which is in the Midlands), or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the "spinner" reference to mean that the mill is a textile mill, which is probably the most common kind of disused, ex-industrial mill, there are several possibilities. The British textile industry, most of which had died by the 1950s, centred around wool in Yorkshire and Lanarkshire, jute in the Dundee area, silk and linen in Fife and cotton in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lanarkshire and Nottinghamshire - also silk in Derby and some parts of Lancashire and lace in Nottingham and in some areas of Ireland and Scotland. There was also a mixture of textile factories in Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Linen-mills occurred widely throughout Britain, and there were numerous tweed and hosiery mills at Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Of these, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire fall within the Midlands, so we're looking at cotton, silk or lace and maybe linen, but probably not wool or jute. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Also, the little mill-towns there aren't close enough to a city to count as being on the outskirts of it. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would be possible in theory, since at one point it was full of mills and estates of working men's cottages. However, most of those cottages were pulled down by 1977, which reduces Derby's chances of being the right place, and most of Derby is in any case too clean and too pretty. There are however a series of little mill-towns in and around Hope Valley, strung out on a line between Derby and Manchester, some in the Midlands and some over the border into Lancashire and Cheshire, and some of which are suitably poor and scruffy. Of these, however, only Bredbury seems to have a matching history - it used to have paper mills and a sludge works - and even there, improvements began in 1966. The scruffier towns in the area also tend to be too far out from the city. However, Cokeworth doesn't have to be an alternative name for a real place - it can be a fictional town on the edge between Derbyshire and Manchester, just that bit sadder and more run-down than the ones which are really there. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Cokeworth is on the very outskirts of the city which Harry sees from the window of the Railview Hotel, then Manchester is a good candidate, with Cokeworth being placed just over the border into Derbyshire. Manchester is actually known as "the town of tall chimneys," and the paintings of LS Lowry, which have come to typify the northern English industrial townscape, are mainly of the Salford/Manchester area. [I’ve been told that JK actually said on an arts programme that she is a big fan of Lowry's, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.] "Lancashire Scene 1925" by LS Lowry, from Anthony Seaton\'s Lowry educational site Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background (and the fact that it's specified as in Lancashire and therefore slightly too far north accordinbg to Pottermore), Lowry’s “Lancashire Street Scene 1925” could be Snape's house in Spinner's End – so much so that I wonder if JK was inspired by this particular drawing. If that mill near Spinner's End is actually a steel mill then Birmingham or Sheffield are good candidates for the city near Cokeworth, or possibly the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation, which is mainly concerned with ceramics but has had some steel works in the past. It must be that Cokeworth is a satellite town or suburb, rather than the city itself, because even aside from the business about the hotel, if it was part of a thousand-year-old city (and most of them are that old, or older) it's unlikely Bella and Cissy could be the first pure-bloods to set foot there, or even think that they were. Of course, Bella could just be being her usual bigoted self - but if she really means it she's more likely to be talking about some purpose-built little late Georgian or Victorian mill-town, floating about the edge of a major industrial zone such as Manchester or Birmingham. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated. The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive. However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world. If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin. The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas. Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
If a tiny four-room house of the type I have suggested for the Snapes were to be converted to add a bathroom, this would probably be done by dividing the smaller bedroom on the first floor into a small bathroom plus an extended landing with space for steps up to a loft-conversion bedroom in the attic. The attic room might have a dormer window, or just a skylight set flush into the roof.
Alternatively, the main bedroom might be divided and part of it used for a bathroom, resulting in an upper floor with one medium and one small bedroom and a tiny bathroom, instead of one large and one medium bedroom, although this would probably result in either the bathroom or the new small bedroom having no window and no exterior wall. Or, of course, a bathroom could simply be added in wizard-space, with a door off the existing small landing.
N.B. Any of these suggested layouts could of course be mirror-reversed, and the back doors may be on either side of the kitchen relative to the front door, and the lavvies and coal bunkers on either side of the yards so long as they don't obstruct the kitchen door and back gate.
If you accept Pottermore as canon then we now know that Spinner's End is in the Midlands. This is a roughly oblong band of country which stretches diagonally across the middle of England, from the Welsh borders to the North Sea, bounded roughly by Ross-on-Wye in the south-west corner, Oswestry in the north-west, the southern edge of Cleethorpes in the north-east and Holbeach in the south-east.
We aren’t told what sort of mill the disused mill near Spinner’s End is. The real Spinner's End is actually in a steel-mill area, which suggests the Black Country near Birmingham (which is in the Midlands), or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill.
If, however, we take the "spinner" reference to mean that the mill is a textile mill, which is probably the most common kind of disused, ex-industrial mill, there are several possibilities. The British textile industry, most of which had died by the 1950s, centred around wool in Yorkshire and Lanarkshire, jute in the Dundee area, silk and linen in Fife and cotton in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lanarkshire and Nottinghamshire - also silk in Derby and some parts of Lancashire and lace in Nottingham and in some areas of Ireland and Scotland. There was also a mixture of textile factories in Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Linen-mills occurred widely throughout Britain, and there were numerous tweed and hosiery mills at Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Of these, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire fall within the Midlands, so we're looking at cotton, silk or lace and maybe linen, but probably not wool or jute.
The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Also, the little mill-towns there aren't close enough to a city to count as being on the outskirts of it.
Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would be possible in theory, since at one point it was full of mills and estates of working men's cottages. However, most of those cottages were pulled down by 1977, which reduces Derby's chances of being the right place, and most of Derby is in any case too clean and too pretty.
There are however a series of little mill-towns in and around Hope Valley, strung out on a line between Derby and Manchester, some in the Midlands and some over the border into Lancashire and Cheshire, and some of which are suitably poor and scruffy. Of these, however, only Bredbury seems to have a matching history - it used to have paper mills and a sludge works - and even there, improvements began in 1966. The scruffier towns in the area also tend to be too far out from the city. However, Cokeworth doesn't have to be an alternative name for a real place - it can be a fictional town on the edge between Derbyshire and Manchester, just that bit sadder and more run-down than the ones which are really there. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Cokeworth is on the very outskirts of the city which Harry sees from the window of the Railview Hotel, then Manchester is a good candidate, with Cokeworth being placed just over the border into Derbyshire. Manchester is actually known as "the town of tall chimneys," and the paintings of LS Lowry, which have come to typify the northern English industrial townscape, are mainly of the Salford/Manchester area. [I’ve been told that JK actually said on an arts programme that she is a big fan of Lowry's, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.] "Lancashire Scene 1925" by LS Lowry, from Anthony Seaton\'s Lowry educational site Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background (and the fact that it's specified as in Lancashire and therefore slightly too far north accordinbg to Pottermore), Lowry’s “Lancashire Street Scene 1925” could be Snape's house in Spinner's End – so much so that I wonder if JK was inspired by this particular drawing. If that mill near Spinner's End is actually a steel mill then Birmingham or Sheffield are good candidates for the city near Cokeworth, or possibly the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation, which is mainly concerned with ceramics but has had some steel works in the past. It must be that Cokeworth is a satellite town or suburb, rather than the city itself, because even aside from the business about the hotel, if it was part of a thousand-year-old city (and most of them are that old, or older) it's unlikely Bella and Cissy could be the first pure-bloods to set foot there, or even think that they were. Of course, Bella could just be being her usual bigoted self - but if she really means it she's more likely to be talking about some purpose-built little late Georgian or Victorian mill-town, floating about the edge of a major industrial zone such as Manchester or Birmingham. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated. The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive. However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world. If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin. The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas. Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
If Cokeworth is on the very outskirts of the city which Harry sees from the window of the Railview Hotel, then Manchester is a good candidate, with Cokeworth being placed just over the border into Derbyshire. Manchester is actually known as "the town of tall chimneys," and the paintings of LS Lowry, which have come to typify the northern English industrial townscape, are mainly of the Salford/Manchester area. [I’ve been told that JK actually said on an arts programme that she is a big fan of Lowry's, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.] "Lancashire Scene 1925" by LS Lowry, from Anthony Seaton\'s Lowry educational site Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background (and the fact that it's specified as in Lancashire and therefore slightly too far north accordinbg to Pottermore), Lowry’s “Lancashire Street Scene 1925” could be Snape's house in Spinner's End – so much so that I wonder if JK was inspired by this particular drawing. If that mill near Spinner's End is actually a steel mill then Birmingham or Sheffield are good candidates for the city near Cokeworth, or possibly the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation, which is mainly concerned with ceramics but has had some steel works in the past. It must be that Cokeworth is a satellite town or suburb, rather than the city itself, because even aside from the business about the hotel, if it was part of a thousand-year-old city (and most of them are that old, or older) it's unlikely Bella and Cissy could be the first pure-bloods to set foot there, or even think that they were. Of course, Bella could just be being her usual bigoted self - but if she really means it she's more likely to be talking about some purpose-built little late Georgian or Victorian mill-town, floating about the edge of a major industrial zone such as Manchester or Birmingham. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated. The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive. However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world. If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin. The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas. Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background (and the fact that it's specified as in Lancashire and therefore slightly too far north accordinbg to Pottermore), Lowry’s “Lancashire Street Scene 1925” could be Snape's house in Spinner's End – so much so that I wonder if JK was inspired by this particular drawing.
If that mill near Spinner's End is actually a steel mill then Birmingham or Sheffield are good candidates for the city near Cokeworth, or possibly the Stoke-on-Trent conurbation, which is mainly concerned with ceramics but has had some steel works in the past. It must be that Cokeworth is a satellite town or suburb, rather than the city itself, because even aside from the business about the hotel, if it was part of a thousand-year-old city (and most of them are that old, or older) it's unlikely Bella and Cissy could be the first pure-bloods to set foot there, or even think that they were.
Of course, Bella could just be being her usual bigoted self - but if she really means it she's more likely to be talking about some purpose-built little late Georgian or Victorian mill-town, floating about the edge of a major industrial zone such as Manchester or Birmingham. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated. The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive. However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world. If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin. The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas. Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
In some of my own stories I have placed Spinner's End in Derbyshire because a friend called Dee Suil-Levanne is from Derby, and this enables me to use authentic local dialect. Dee specifically suggests either a tatty suburb at the edge of Derby called Ormskirk Rise, Stockport near Manchester (although Stockport itself has now been ruled out by the revelation that Cokeworth is in the Midlands) or New Mills in the Hope Valley. New Mills is at the junction of two rivers (the Goyt and the Sett) and has at least one surviving finger-like mill chimney and some old factory-workers' houses, and is decidedly scruffy and rough and un-Yuppified (or was circa 1990 when Dee knew it), with a harsh whiney accent which would have been a particular social cross for young Severus to bear. [Apologies to anyone reading this who comes from New Mills!] Looking at photographs of New Mills, though, I'm inclined to think it's not oppressive enough to be the site of Spinner's End: despite a certain lingering industrial grimness, and the neighbouring presence of a huge cement factory, it's too open and the beautiful surrounding countryside is too readily visible, and lifts the mood of the place. In any case the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, and therefore in a place which is attached to the edge of a big city, probably rules New Mills out as too isolated.
The same applies to Coalville, a Midlands town in north-west Leicestershire, although the coincidence of the name is attractive.
However, Cokeworth does not have to be exactly like a real place. The "worth" part of the name seems to be common around New Mills - there's a Chisworth, a Charlesworth and a Buxworth all within a few miles - so perhaps in the Potterverse the edge of Stockport extends three or four miles further than it does in real life, and joins up with an extra little mill-town in the vicinity of New Mills - or a fictional version of Coalville is closer to Leicester than the seven miles which separate them in our world.
If we go just by book-canon and ignore Pottermore, there are a wide range of places Spinner's End could be. As well as the possibilities in the Midlands there are all the textile areas in in the north of England, in Northern Ireland and southern Scotland. There's even a suitably tatty and polluted area of cobbles and run-down houses and mill-chimneys in Reading. That's probably much too near London, not to mention only about twenty miles from Little Whinging: but you could make an interesting case for Spinner’s End being in Reading and Petunia having stayed fairly close to her point of origin.
The Scottish possibilities are mainly Lanarkshire, the Dundee area or Hawick. Most houses in Scotland are built of stone blocks, not bricks, but there are surviving rows of brick-built working men's housing in these areas.
Yorkshire would be a nice choice in some ways - culturally interesting, and it would be quite romantic to think of Snape as a Dalesman. However, the British tourist industry thinks that Yorkshire is romantic too, and most places in Yorkshire have been cleaned up and renovated. If Spinner's End was in Yorkshire it's unlikely that the houses would be standing empty in 1996 - unless, of course, they are unsound and due to be pulled down and replaced by a modern estate. Even in that case, it's still fairly unlikely that a river in most places in Yorkshire would be that dirty as recently as 1996. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it: "Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire." However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate. We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
Halifax has been suggested, because it has suitable chimneys and some genuine Snapes living there, but if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. If we want to place Spinner's End in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial.
If we ignore Pottermore, one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location – industrialized but poor, with a long history of large-scale textile production, and much less “discovered” than Yorkshire. The BBC's website on King Cotton has this to say about it:
"Lancashire's damp climate (some may call rainy!) was perfect for maintaining the moisture in fine cotton yarns, whilst the abundant supply of water via rivers in Pennine towns and cities drove water-powered mills.//Twenty-nine of the 35 steam driven engines later acquired by cotton businesses were installed in Lancashire."
However, Pennine towns go down in likelihood because the river near Spinner's End is described as winding and it evidently has a path alongside it - suggesting the town is on fairly level ground, not right up in the hills. And the further up, the more likely the river is to be clean. This likewise reduces the chances for many of the Yorkshire wool towns, quite apart from the tourism issue – we’re looking for somewhere a bit lower down, or at least less precipitate.
We would have a lot more leeway as to location if we could say that that level, slow, winding waterway near Spinner's End was a canal. Unfortunately the thing is described as a river before Cissy and Bella appear, so it's not their wizardly ignorance which calls it a river: it's authentic authorial overview. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel. If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe". A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful. More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family. There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6. Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size. The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
Low-lying areas of Lancashire provide many possibilities, such as Blackburn, about twenty miles north-west of Manchester (N.B. not the same Blackburn Susan Boyle comes from, which is in West Lothian about three miles from me). Blackburn had both wool and cotton mills, became seriously run-down and is still quite a poor area. Its waterways were very polluted by the 1970s, and although they’ve been cleaned up since they still have frequent pollution incidents. Even if we accept Pottermore as canon (which personally I do unless it clashes directly with the books), and place Cokeworth in the Midlands, places such as Blackburn still give us a good idea of what Cokeworth would look like.
Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good example – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, its population is only 73,500 so it may not qualify as a city big enough to fit what Harry saw from the hotel.
If Spinner's End is in England, then, and leaving aside the information on Pottermore, it is probably in either Nottinghamshire, the low-lying western side of Lancashire which includes Manchester and Blackburn, the areas of Yorkshire around Bradford and Huddersfield, or Hope Valley in north Derbyshire/south Lancashire. All of these regions have brick houses and pockets of shabby poverty, they have mill-chimneys and cobbles, they are low-lying enough for the river to wind and to have a track alongside it, they hadn't been too totally Yuppified or cleaned up by summer 1996 and it is at least possible to speculate that no pure-blood might have set foot in a given small town in those areas before that date.
Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Hawick however isn't big enough to look like a big city to Harry, as its population is just under 15,000. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996.
There is another possible approach, and that is to look for possible origins for the name Cokeworth. In reality it's probably a tribute to Coketown, a fictional industrial town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, and Rowling has said that "Cokeworth's name is supposed to suggest an industrial town, and to evoke associations of hard work and grime", but that can't be its meaning "in universe".
A worth is an enclosure or homestead. There is a real coal-mining town in Leicestershire which is called Coalville, so it's conceivable that the "Coke" bit really does mean coke, but that doesn't go very well with "worth". Coke can also be derived from Cook, or from Cock in the sense of a male chicken, or from Cock in the sense of a mound or heap, which isn't very helpful.
More promisingly, Coke can be derived from the Old English/Welsh equivalent of the Old Irish word cucar, crooked (thanks to Shy Foxling for all this research into the meaning of the name), making "crooked homestead" which is reminiscent of The Burrow. If you ignore Pottermore, there is a very winding river called the Cocker in Lancashire, which rises between two features called Knowe Hill and Yeat House, a little way north-east of Borbles Hall. It flows broadly south-west and passes under the Lancaster Canal a little before a place called Potter's Brook, then winds back and forth before flowing into the sea at Cockerham. En route it passes by places called Cock Hall Farm, Cocker House, Cocker Bridge and Crookhey Farm, so the presence of a place called originally Cocker-worth, homestead-on-the-Cocker, would make perfect sense. About four miles to the south of Potter's Brook we find Snape Wood Farm, suggesting that the Snapes may be a local family.
There is not in real life any town on the Cocker except the small coastal town of Cockerham. Just to the north, however, on the nearby river Condor, is the small town of Galgate which used to be a centre for silk-weaving, complete with mills, and less than two miles north of Galgate is the city of Lancaster. If you want to ignore the information on Pottermore that Cokeworth is in the Midlands, it could be a fictional silk-mill town just south of real-life Galgate, in the parish of Ellel close to both the railway line and the A6 and M6.
Lancaster itself is tiny, as British cities go - only about 46,000 people. But it's contiguous with Morecambe, Heysham and other towns in the area, and Harry would just see a block of streetlights in the dark, without knowing that they were technically several different towns which had run together at the edges. As a group, Lancaster and the towns which join onto it have a population of about 134,000 - about the same size as Brighton. It's still pushing it a bit to call it a big city but it's certainly quite a good size.
The closest that Cokeworth could be to Lancaster and still be close enough to the Cocker to be called after it is in the Cock Hall Farm/Ellel Grange area, near the railway line about two thirds of a mile south of Galgate and two and a half miles south of the southern end of Lancaster. But if there's a new small town just south of Galgate in the Potterverse that isn't there in our world, it could also be that Lancaster itself has spread slightly south and joined up with Galgate, thus also increasing its population. Mackinsons Row, Galgate,, from findaproperty.com Galgate as it stands is too nice to contain Spinner's End, because of its rural setting, but it has little houses and big mill chimneys, and if in the fictional universe Lancaster had spread a couple of miles south to touch the Cocker then the area would be more intensely industrial. Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded. Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway. Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland. What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross. Conclusion Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible. The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall. It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building. It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft. The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
Galgate certainly has some of the requisite tiny terraced houses (with, in some cases, tiny terraced front gardens) - not quite in the serried ranks we see in Cokeworth, but again the very existence of a Cokeworth would mean that industry in the area had expanded.
Ironically, Galgate has been voted the third best place to bring up children in Britain. Perhaps Severus grew up in Cokeworth and Lily and Tuney a mile or so to the north in Galgate.
Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north (semi-north, anyway) of England defuses a lot of his apparent harshness and nastiness, because it means much of it is just cultural. In that area "surly and antisocial" is rather admired, and rudeness (known as "being blunt") is regarded as a sign of honesty and is cultivated as a virtue. Indeed, one can say that he's probably from a fairly northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. Indeed some people from the Midlands speak with an accent called the Midlands Drawl, which is said to sound sarcastic even when it isn't meant to be, so perhaps Snape became sarcastic because everybody assumed he was anyway.
Also, Snape uses the expression "dunderhead," which is quite often heard in the north of England but rare elsewhere, and he describes Mundungus Fletcher as "smelly" - a word common among children all over Britain, but rarely used by adults, unless they are from the Lancashire/Derbyshire area, which fits with the idea of him coming from the northern end of the Midlands.
In my essay on the location of Hogwarts I show that Hogwarts is definitely in Scotland, most probably in the Kintail/Lochalsh area of the West Highlands, or failing that in the Galloway Hills in south-west Scotland.
What I want to know is whether young Snape has to come a hundred-plus miles from the Midlands down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express (we certainly see both him and Lily at King's Cross, but they could have combined it with a trip to Diagon Alley for school supplies). What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate?
Logic suggests that the train must make several stops as it travels north - either that, or school officials collect pupils from their homes and Apparate them to London. Otherwise you would end up with a ridiculous situation where someone from Inverness had to pay a small fortune, travel six hundred miles and spend fifteen hours on the train in order to end up forty miles from where they started from. Based on its likely route, I would suggest the train, if it stops, probably picks up passengers at Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness.
Another possibility is that there are fixed Portkey-type portals at major stations throughout Britain, so that students can walk through a wall at a station in Cardiff, say, or Durham, and find themselves on the platform at King's Cross.
Spinner's End is a street in the fictional Potterverse location called Cokeworth, which is a small satellite town on the edge of a larger city. If you accept Pottermore canon then Cokeworth is in the Midlands and the nearby city is probably Birmingham, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent or Manchester. If you ignore Pottermore then a good candidate for the city would be Lancaster, with Cokeworth lying on the Cocker River close to Galgate (and to Snape Wood!). It was built mainly to house workers at a local mill - probably a textile mill, especially if it is near Lancaster, although a steel mill is also possible.
The Snapes' house is a small end-of-terrace "two-up-two-down" house probably built for workers at the mill, with a frontage not much over 12ft across. It is one room wide and two rooms deep, and if it is still in its original state it will have a small living-room and kitchen downstairs and a medium-sized and a small bedroom upstairs, an outdoor lavatory in a yard (a paved or earth-floored yard, not grassed) at the back, and no bathroom. Beyond the house, on the side farthest from the river, the street comes to some kind of an end - it might be a cul-de-sac, or finish in open country or allotments or a factory wall.
It is likely that the front door opens right onto the street: if there is anything in the nature of a front garden it probably won't be more than four to six feet deep. The door opens straight into the living room, at one of the front corners. The living room will be about 9ft wide and 12ft deep. A stair leads upstairs behind a door in the other front corner of the room, so if you enter the room on the left the stair will be on your right and vice versa. Opposite the front door is a door through to a small kitchen at the back, and another door (which may be anywhere along the back wall) leads from the kitchen to the back yard. The stairs run up the side-wall of the house from front to middle of the building and emerge onto a tiny landing. To the side of this landing is a fair-sized bedroom which is above the living room: in front of you is a small bedroom which is above the kitchen. The foot of the stairs turns so that the last couple of treads face the door into the living room, rather than running straight towards the front of the building.
It is possible that by HBP the house has been expanded by the addition of an extension and/or loft-conversion, or that the larger bedroom has been split into a small bedroom and a bathroom. If there is a loft conversion then the small bedroom will probably have been turned into a bathroom plus a stair up to a bedroom in the loft.
The Evanses live in a more up-market street in the same area. They may have a larger two-up-two-down, one with bigger rooms, a small front garden and a "return" at the back, essentially an extension which adds a scullery on the ground floor and a third bedroom upstairs, making the house a three-up-three-down. They would probably have had the scullery turned into a bathroom.
