Spinner's End in Real Life (and a trailor tip)

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 136688

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "saraquel_omphale" 
<saraquel_omphale at y...> wrote:
> "potioncat" <willsonkmom at m...> wrote:
> > Back when everyone was guessing about Spinner's End, someone came 
up 
> > with a real life location in an industrial area of England. Does 
> > anyone recall that? It was possibly an old, no longer used 
address 
> or 
> > place name. 

Saraquel:
>  Hi Potioncat, it might have been me, I know I wrote about the 
> possible location of Spinner's End in answer to a post about Hagrid 
> taking baby Harry to Snape's house before going to the Dursley's.  
> Anyway, the description of the type of houses and the mill chimney 
are 
> classic north of England.  Manchester (in the then county of 
> Lancaster) was the centre of the cotton milling industry and was 
the 
> cradle of the industrial revolution. Leeds was the centre of the 
wool 
> industry. The Spinning Jenny (a mechanised loom) was invented in 
the 
> mid to late 18th Century and caused riots, as before that time, 
people 
> had spun cloth in their homes.  But it's invention (plus steam 
> technology) brought about the building of mills to process both 
wool 
> and cotton. This originated in the slave trade to the West Indies 
and 
> Southern United States in the 17th/18th century.  As you know, 
cotton 
> was grown, which was then shipped back to England and arrived in 
the 
> port of Liverpool.  It was then taken up the Manchester Ship Canal 
and 
> processed in and around the city.
> 
> The wool industry was based on the other side of the range of hills 
> that runs up the centre of England (The Pennines)  The centre was 
> Leeds, but also towns like Halifax, Huddersfield and Wakefield (in 
the 
> county of Yorkshire).

Geoff:
A couple of points. 

(1) Back in the early post-HBP days(!), I wrote in message 132927:

"Spinner's End. We still don't know where it is. But the ruined 
chimney and the name of the road make me think of a Lancashire cotton 
town – I grew up in one. Workers in the mills were sometimes called 
weavers or spinners. This chapter though, for me, was a real eye-
opener so early in the book."

Just to enlarge a fraction on that comment, my mother (and also my 
maternal grandfather) both worked in the cotton weaving industry 
before she was married and I recall living in the sort of terrace 
houses Saraquel mentioned in Burnley, in North-east Lancashire, until 
I was 9.

(2) Referring back to Spinners End as a name, I would recommend that 
if you go back to message 116875, thread title "What we find there", 
Steve kicked off discussion on the whereabouts of this place when it 
was first revealed as a chapter name round about the end of October 
last year. The names of an industrial estate in Cradley Heath in the 
West Midlands and an area in Weston-Super-Mare in North Somerset 
featured in the discussion. It is interesting to re-read these 
threads in hindsight.