So Where is Spinner's End?

I said recently that I'd have a go at narrowing down the possibilities for the sort of location for this (fictional) place.



Probably most fans could not give a rat's arse (or indeed a rat animagus' arse) about the location of Spinner's End, but I could, so indulge me.

First off, why is it significant, at all? Some die-hards have even insisted that this house is not Snape's and that it is a "safe house" for the Death Eaters in the same way that 12 Grimmauld Place is. Well it cannot be. Because Narcissa had no trouble finding it. There's no Fidelius charm, which I think there surely would be if this house was of any significance to the Death Eater infrastructure.

I think this is Snape's ancestral home. And no, it is not a cunningly disguised manor house or castle under some reverse glamour spell. This I suggest is the house he inherited from his parents, Tobias and Eileen. I think it is where he was brought up. And I think upstairs, Peter has use of the bedroom, where long ago, a greasy haired teenager took potshots at the flies, while practising his flair for dark spells. Snape has probably taken over the larger bedroom, which was his parents'.

The room we do see, is the room where "...a hook-nosed man was shouting at a cowering woman while a dark-haired boy cried in a corner". Add the books, and it might be the same room.

I think this house was Tobias's and is now Snape's. He keeps it because he needs somewhere to live during the summer holidays. He's not living in some grand place by virtue of his adherence (real or feigned) to Lord Voldemort, because Voldemort has not won yet. If Voldemort does win, and Snape is still demonstrating loyalty and drawing breath, he might end up with better. For the nonce, this is what he has.

He might not be sentimental about the place - and the air of neglect and quality of the furniture suggests he doesn't care about this one way or the other, but this is what he has. His money is probably spent on the things that matter to him, books.

It is also good cover. No one expects to find him in a place like this, not even Bellatrix, a close (if not liked) DE colleague. Certainly none of the fandom expected to see him in a place like this.

What sort of house is this? English readers who have seen the likes of Coronation Street will get the picture. It is probably an old two-up two-down, no garden, with a back yard, wherein is an outside privy, and coal house, or washhouse. I was brought up in such a house (there was nothing scuzzy about such in the 1950's). It is likely that these houses were built for the mill workers at the nearby mill. The other term for such housing is "back-to-back". The main door is on the street front, and opens directly to the street (there is no entrance hall). There is an alley at the back. I'm still looking for a good example photo of this sort of housing, but probably as it is generally run down, no one seems to want to post one anywhere.

The area is dominated by a now defunct mill, and it is clear from the name of the street in question, that the mill was important. This street is called "Spinner's End" and in my prosaic way, I think it is called that simply because this is the end of the mill factory where the workers who spun the cloth entered. The street has the mill at the end, and there you are.

My next musings moved onto the mill itself. It's not a windmill with the four vanes, that look so cute. Wipe that image out of your heads, if you have it. Mill, and Spinners meant textiles, so this narrowed down the location for me.

We had two big textile industries in England. The senior one was wool. England has had a major wool industry since the Middle Ages, and it has always been largely centred on Yorkshire. West Yorkshire to be exact. The younger textile industry is Cotton, centred in Lancashire. There were two major reasons for the cotton industry's location there - it's proximity to the west coast (for raw cotton came from the southern United States and shipping generally went to and from Liverpool) and the dampness of the climate. Cotton is best spun in damp air, because it tends to snap easily when overdry.

So I took out my atlases and started narrowing it down.

Then I went back to the chapter. The first geographical feature we see, is a dirty river. A fairly minor one by the look of it. So I went back to my atlases. There are hardly any of the "cotton" towns that have a river. Indeed rivers are a problem in Lancashire, hence the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal, to link Manchester to Liverpool. So I turned to Yorkshire and wool.

Paydirt.



Pre-Industrial Milling required a river to power it. Therefore many Yorkshire mills would be adjacent to a stream of some sort. Cotton was an industry that post dated the invention of machinery, and the river was less important. I therefore think Snape is a Tyke, which is a slang term for a Yorkshireman. I know at least one member of my f-list who might be pleased by this news.

So which mill town is it? Hard to say, for there are many, and I do not have a detailed map of West Yorkshire (and I doubt I'll be buying one, I'm not that obsessed. I only have any detail on larger towns, and by that reasoning, suggest Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford, Wakefield, Dewsbury.

I actually think JKR made up the town which contains Spinner's End, but might have based it on a number of towns.

But look at this:



"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..."

(HBP: Page 27, UK edition.)

And this:



Both these pictures are of the Yorkshire town of Halifax which has a strong tradition of woollen milling.

The industry is not dead, by the way. There are still carpets made in West Yorkshire. However, it's not what it once was. The tide of manufacturing receded from the northern industrial heartland, leaving in its wake terribly rundown areas, of which Spinner's End seems to be a good example. Much of this sort of housing is either demolished, or gentrified. The area Snape is living in does not seem to have benefited from any regeneration initiative. Probably he likes it that way. I suggest that the very dereliction of the area (most of the houses are boarded up and unoccupied) suits him to a T. Whatever side he is on, because he'd not want anyone to be watching his movements.

So, anyway, my suggestion is that Spinner's End is in a town in West Yorkshire, modelled on the likes of Huddersfield and Halifax.

What do you think? Shoot me down if you like, I'm not married to this idea, but it has a good beat and you can dance to it. And I'm geeky about stuff like this.