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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.
Images from Geograph are used and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence.
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.
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]
1) It's a long way from London.
2) It's in an industrial-style mill-town: 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 is dirty enough to be smelled several streets away, 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 they 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 this is Snape's childhood home, and Bellatrix knows that it is, 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.
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 six 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.
Back gardens if any will probably be measly little scraps of grass, but 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.
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 of England, can be gained by ready the Andy Capp cartoons. Yes, they are a stereotype, but they're a sterotype 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 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), this is the sort of thing that would be feasible: with or without the tiny front-garden and bay window. 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? 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, or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the name 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 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. 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 fact that JK is Scottish-based raises the likelihood that Spinner's End is in Scotland, most likely 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. However, mill chimneys and cobbles are typically used to signify the industrial north of England, so unless we are told otherwise, that’s probably what JK Rowling meant to convey. 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 is 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. A fanwriter called June Diamanti has argued that Spinner’s End might be in Halifax in Yorkshire, based in part on a very striking photograph of a mill chimney towering over a cobbled street in Halifax, and in part on the existence of a Snape family who used to own a shop in the town. However, the Snape name, although not common, is fairly widespread, and the photograph in question is unlikely to have been JKR’s inspiration because it doesn’t actually show any houses, just a very steep cobbled road which is clearly very much higher up than the level on which the mill is standing. There's nothing to suggest Spinner's End is high up, except that Cissy is said to go "up the street" - but this is usually just a synonym for "along." It's true that the sisters as they stand by the river can see that there are row on row of houses, apparently parallel to the river, and that could mean that the houses are ranged in ranks up a steep hillside - but there's nothing else to suggest this. If the roads were at a great slope you would expect JK would say so, and it is likely that the sisters know there are multiple rows of houses because the alley is close enough for them to look down it and see the ends of the rows. It is clear from the description that as they stand at the top of the bank, the alley is more or less directly opposite them. Halifax is actually an unlikely location for Spinner’s End, as the river which runs through Halifax is very clean. In 2002, a factory accident contaminated a stream in or near Halifax and the company concerned undertook to return the water to its former condition – which included restocking it with the 60,000 salmon and 30,000 trout which had been living in it up until July 2002. Nor is it likely that it was very dirty in the mid 1990s, because it was exceedingly clean at Hebden Bridge just upriver from Halifax in the mid '80s, when I was with a party who went skinny-dipping in it; and since the local heavy industry was already dead it's unlikely it could have been reeking with pollution only a few miles further on. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Also, if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. It's possible you could still have found some really scruffy bits in Halifax in the mid ‘90s, but it’s not a very likely choice. If Spinner's End is in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but like much of Yorkshire it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would also 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, over the border into Lancashire, which are suitably poor and scruffy. Lancashire, north of Derbyshire and west of Yorkshire, is a very suitable area – 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. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Spinner's End is in or very near to a city in England, then one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location, as this was such a big area for industrial-scale textile production. 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, 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. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn. If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. 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. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
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), this is the sort of thing that would be feasible: with or without the tiny front-garden and bay window. 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? 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, or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the name 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 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. 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 fact that JK is Scottish-based raises the likelihood that Spinner's End is in Scotland, most likely 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. However, mill chimneys and cobbles are typically used to signify the industrial north of England, so unless we are told otherwise, that’s probably what JK Rowling meant to convey. 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 is 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. A fanwriter called June Diamanti has argued that Spinner’s End might be in Halifax in Yorkshire, based in part on a very striking photograph of a mill chimney towering over a cobbled street in Halifax, and in part on the existence of a Snape family who used to own a shop in the town. However, the Snape name, although not common, is fairly widespread, and the photograph in question is unlikely to have been JKR’s inspiration because it doesn’t actually show any houses, just a very steep cobbled road which is clearly very much higher up than the level on which the mill is standing. There's nothing to suggest Spinner's End is high up, except that Cissy is said to go "up the street" - but this is usually just a synonym for "along." It's true that the sisters as they stand by the river can see that there are row on row of houses, apparently parallel to the river, and that could mean that the houses are ranged in ranks up a steep hillside - but there's nothing else to suggest this. If the roads were at a great slope you would expect JK would say so, and it is likely that the sisters know there are multiple rows of houses because the alley is close enough for them to look down it and see the ends of the rows. It is clear from the description that as they stand at the top of the bank, the alley is more or less directly opposite them. Halifax is actually an unlikely location for Spinner’s End, as the river which runs through Halifax is very clean. In 2002, a factory accident contaminated a stream in or near Halifax and the company concerned undertook to return the water to its former condition – which included restocking it with the 60,000 salmon and 30,000 trout which had been living in it up until July 2002. Nor is it likely that it was very dirty in the mid 1990s, because it was exceedingly clean at Hebden Bridge just upriver from Halifax in the mid '80s, when I was with a party who went skinny-dipping in it; and since the local heavy industry was already dead it's unlikely it could have been reeking with pollution only a few miles further on. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Also, if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. It's possible you could still have found some really scruffy bits in Halifax in the mid ‘90s, but it’s not a very likely choice. If Spinner's End is in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but like much of Yorkshire it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would also 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, over the border into Lancashire, which are suitably poor and scruffy. Lancashire, north of Derbyshire and west of Yorkshire, is a very suitable area – 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. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Spinner's End is in or very near to a city in England, then one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location, as this was such a big area for industrial-scale textile production. 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, 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. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn. If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. 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. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
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), this is the sort of thing that would be feasible: with or without the tiny front-garden and bay window. 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? 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, or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the name 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 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. 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 fact that JK is Scottish-based raises the likelihood that Spinner's End is in Scotland, most likely 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. However, mill chimneys and cobbles are typically used to signify the industrial north of England, so unless we are told otherwise, that’s probably what JK Rowling meant to convey. 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 is 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. A fanwriter called June Diamanti has argued that Spinner’s End might be in Halifax in Yorkshire, based in part on a very striking photograph of a mill chimney towering over a cobbled street in Halifax, and in part on the existence of a Snape family who used to own a shop in the town. However, the Snape name, although not common, is fairly widespread, and the photograph in question is unlikely to have been JKR’s inspiration because it doesn’t actually show any houses, just a very steep cobbled road which is clearly very much higher up than the level on which the mill is standing. There's nothing to suggest Spinner's End is high up, except that Cissy is said to go "up the street" - but this is usually just a synonym for "along." It's true that the sisters as they stand by the river can see that there are row on row of houses, apparently parallel to the river, and that could mean that the houses are ranged in ranks up a steep hillside - but there's nothing else to suggest this. If the roads were at a great slope you would expect JK would say so, and it is likely that the sisters know there are multiple rows of houses because the alley is close enough for them to look down it and see the ends of the rows. It is clear from the description that as they stand at the top of the bank, the alley is more or less directly opposite them. Halifax is actually an unlikely location for Spinner’s End, as the river which runs through Halifax is very clean. In 2002, a factory accident contaminated a stream in or near Halifax and the company concerned undertook to return the water to its former condition – which included restocking it with the 60,000 salmon and 30,000 trout which had been living in it up until July 2002. Nor is it likely that it was very dirty in the mid 1990s, because it was exceedingly clean at Hebden Bridge just upriver from Halifax in the mid '80s, when I was with a party who went skinny-dipping in it; and since the local heavy industry was already dead it's unlikely it could have been reeking with pollution only a few miles further on. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Also, if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. It's possible you could still have found some really scruffy bits in Halifax in the mid ‘90s, but it’s not a very likely choice. If Spinner's End is in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but like much of Yorkshire it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would also 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, over the border into Lancashire, which are suitably poor and scruffy. Lancashire, north of Derbyshire and west of Yorkshire, is a very suitable area – 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. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Spinner's End is in or very near to a city in England, then one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location, as this was such a big area for industrial-scale textile production. 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, 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. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn. If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. 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. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
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), this is the sort of thing that would be feasible: with or without the tiny front-garden and bay window. 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? 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, or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill. If, however, we take the name 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 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. 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 fact that JK is Scottish-based raises the likelihood that Spinner's End is in Scotland, most likely 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. However, mill chimneys and cobbles are typically used to signify the industrial north of England, so unless we are told otherwise, that’s probably what JK Rowling meant to convey. 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 is 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. A fanwriter called June Diamanti has argued that Spinner’s End might be in Halifax in Yorkshire, based in part on a very striking photograph of a mill chimney towering over a cobbled street in Halifax, and in part on the existence of a Snape family who used to own a shop in the town. However, the Snape name, although not common, is fairly widespread, and the photograph in question is unlikely to have been JKR’s inspiration because it doesn’t actually show any houses, just a very steep cobbled road which is clearly very much higher up than the level on which the mill is standing. There's nothing to suggest Spinner's End is high up, except that Cissy is said to go "up the street" - but this is usually just a synonym for "along." It's true that the sisters as they stand by the river can see that there are row on row of houses, apparently parallel to the river, and that could mean that the houses are ranged in ranks up a steep hillside - but there's nothing else to suggest this. If the roads were at a great slope you would expect JK would say so, and it is likely that the sisters know there are multiple rows of houses because the alley is close enough for them to look down it and see the ends of the rows. It is clear from the description that as they stand at the top of the bank, the alley is more or less directly opposite them. Halifax is actually an unlikely location for Spinner’s End, as the river which runs through Halifax is very clean. In 2002, a factory accident contaminated a stream in or near Halifax and the company concerned undertook to return the water to its former condition – which included restocking it with the 60,000 salmon and 30,000 trout which had been living in it up until July 2002. Nor is it likely that it was very dirty in the mid 1990s, because it was exceedingly clean at Hebden Bridge just upriver from Halifax in the mid '80s, when I was with a party who went skinny-dipping in it; and since the local heavy industry was already dead it's unlikely it could have been reeking with pollution only a few miles further on. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Also, if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. It's possible you could still have found some really scruffy bits in Halifax in the mid ‘90s, but it’s not a very likely choice. If Spinner's End is in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but like much of Yorkshire it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would also 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, over the border into Lancashire, which are suitably poor and scruffy. Lancashire, north of Derbyshire and west of Yorkshire, is a very suitable area – 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. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Spinner's End is in or very near to a city in England, then one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location, as this was such a big area for industrial-scale textile production. 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, 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. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn. If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. 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. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
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.
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, or the Clyde area in Scotland. The mill could even be a paper-mill.
If, however, we take the name 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 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.
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 fact that JK is Scottish-based raises the likelihood that Spinner's End is in Scotland, most likely 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.
However, mill chimneys and cobbles are typically used to signify the industrial north of England, so unless we are told otherwise, that’s probably what JK Rowling meant to convey.
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 is 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.
A fanwriter called June Diamanti has argued that Spinner’s End might be in Halifax in Yorkshire, based in part on a very striking photograph of a mill chimney towering over a cobbled street in Halifax, and in part on the existence of a Snape family who used to own a shop in the town. However, the Snape name, although not common, is fairly widespread, and the photograph in question is unlikely to have been JKR’s inspiration because it doesn’t actually show any houses, just a very steep cobbled road which is clearly very much higher up than the level on which the mill is standing. There's nothing to suggest Spinner's End is high up, except that Cissy is said to go "up the street" - but this is usually just a synonym for "along."
It's true that the sisters as they stand by the river can see that there are row on row of houses, apparently parallel to the river, and that could mean that the houses are ranged in ranks up a steep hillside - but there's nothing else to suggest this. If the roads were at a great slope you would expect JK would say so, and it is likely that the sisters know there are multiple rows of houses because the alley is close enough for them to look down it and see the ends of the rows. It is clear from the description that as they stand at the top of the bank, the alley is more or less directly opposite them.
Halifax is actually an unlikely location for Spinner’s End, as the river which runs through Halifax is very clean. In 2002, a factory accident contaminated a stream in or near Halifax and the company concerned undertook to return the water to its former condition – which included restocking it with the 60,000 salmon and 30,000 trout which had been living in it up until July 2002. Nor is it likely that it was very dirty in the mid 1990s, because it was exceedingly clean at Hebden Bridge just upriver from Halifax in the mid '80s, when I was with a party who went skinny-dipping in it; and since the local heavy industry was already dead it's unlikely it could have been reeking with pollution only a few miles further on. Firth Street, Huddersfield, circa 1998, © Chris Allen at Geograph Also, if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. It's possible you could still have found some really scruffy bits in Halifax in the mid ‘90s, but it’s not a very likely choice. If Spinner's End is in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial. The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but like much of Yorkshire it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would also 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, over the border into Lancashire, which are suitably poor and scruffy. Lancashire, north of Derbyshire and west of Yorkshire, is a very suitable area – 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. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Spinner's End is in or very near to a city in England, then one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location, as this was such a big area for industrial-scale textile production. 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, 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. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn. If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. 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. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
Also, if their town website is anything to go by Halifax is very, very modernized and Yuppified indeed. It's possible you could still have found some really scruffy bits in Halifax in the mid ‘90s, but it’s not a very likely choice. If Spinner's End is in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield are much more likely, as they are both still pretty rough and industrial.
The Derwent Valley in Derbyshire and County Durham is famously lined with water-powered cotton-mills, often with appropriately towering chimneys; but like much of Yorkshire it's a bit too picturesque and touristy, and the water is way too clean. Derby itself (the county town of Derbyshire) would also 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, over the border into Lancashire, which are suitably poor and scruffy.
Lancashire, north of Derbyshire and west of Yorkshire, is a very suitable area – 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. "Canal Bridge" by LS Lowry, from The Fine Art Company If Spinner's End is in or very near to a city in England, then one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location, as this was such a big area for industrial-scale textile production. 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, 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. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn. If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. 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. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
If Spinner's End is in or very near to a city in England, then one of the towns in the lower-lying areas of Lancashire is probably the most likely location, as this was such a big area for industrial-scale textile production. 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, 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. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn. If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. 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. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
Indeed, were it not for the misty presence of what seems to be a very large church in the background, 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. Bolton Road, Blackburn circa 1960, from Blackburn Now & Then Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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. Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image. However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn. If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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. Church Road, New Mills, from photographer Aidan O\'Rourke Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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. Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996. Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic. 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. From home to Hogwarts In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
Another excellent candidate is the Lancashire town of 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.
Burnley, eleven miles east of Blackburn, is another good option – still pretty run down even today, to judge by this Flickr image.
However, I'm inclined to think that Spinner's End is in a small satellite town such as Darwen, or a village, not directly within any very large town or city - because 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 Blackburn.
If Spinner's End is in England, then, 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.
Of these locations, the Manchester/Salford and Blackburn areas are probably the most likely: but in some of my own stories I have gone for 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 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.
Outwith England, other distinct possibilities are Hawick and the Dundee/Fife and Glasgow/Lanark areas in Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Glasgow, Derry and Belfast all had substantially polluted rivers as recently as 1996.
Incidentally, the fact that Snape probably comes from the industrial north 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 northern English industrial area, rather than e.g. Lanarkshire or Derry, precisely because he is so brusque and sarcastic.
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.
In my essay on the location of Hogwarts (which forms part of a project on the layout of Hogwarts which is as yet unfinished), 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 and fifty miles from the north of England down to King's Cross in order to travel four hundred and fifty miles north again on the Hogwarts Express. What about northern students who are Muggle-born, or whose parents can't Apparate? Logic suggests that the train must have 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.
