Riddle's Orphanage

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 177356

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "potioncat" <willsonkmom at ...> wrote:
>
> I'm reading DH with my youngest. My second read, his first. We just 
> started The Goblin's Revenge (at least I think that's the name of the 
> chapter) and the Trio visited the site of Riddle's orphange---now a 
> block of office buildings in London.
> 
> The location of that orphange was a major thread once upon a time---
> maybe there were more than one thread; I don't know. 
> 
> I was wondering what Geoff, and any other participants from that topic, 
> thought about the search and the desciption of the location? Why do you 
> think JKR had them visit the site? Even as they looked, they didn't 
> expect to find anything.
> 
> Potioncat who would have asked this question sooner, but wasn't 
> completely certain she had really read it in DH, and didn't have the 
> canon until tonight.

Geoff:
There was certanly a lot of discussion about Tom Riddle's connections 
with South London in which Shaun Hately and I took a large role in this 
about the end of 2003.

Initially, it arose out of Riddle's diary which carried the name of a 
newsagents in Vauxhall Road. which led to a lot of information about 
the changes in the area especaily the altered names of roads. I lived 
for many years within 3-4 miles of the road and learned an awful lot 
of data about which I knew nothing.

The discussion led us on to consider the Stockwell Orphanage as a 
possible home for Tom Riddle, the orphanage site being a couple of 
miles to the south of Vauxhall Road. It was a Baptist foundation which 
particularly interested me, being a member of a Baptist Church. The 
real world information is that the orphanage children were relocated 
to a new site well out of London in 1953. The location is now the site 
of Stockwell Park Secondary School.

This seems to suggest that JKR may not have had this organisation as 
a model for her orphanage in HBP, judging by the description given in DH:

'Without any other leads, they travelled into London and, hidden beneath 
the Invisibility Cloak, searched for the orphanage in which Voldemort 
had been raised. Hermione stole nto a library and discovered from their 
records that the place had been demolished many years before. They 
visited its site and found a towerblock of offices.
"We could try digging in the foundations?" Hermione suggested 
half-heartedly.
"He wouldn't have hidden a Horcrux here," Harry said. He had known it 
all along: the orphanage had been the place Voldemort had been 
determined to escape from; he would never have hidden a part of his 
soul there. Dumbledore had shown Harry that Voldemort sought grandeur 
or mystique in his hiding places; this dismal, grey corner of London was 
as far as you could imagine from Hogwarts or the Ministry or a building 
like Gringotts, the wizarding bank, with its golden doors and marble 
floors.'
(DH "The Goblin's Revenge" pp.238/39 UK edition)

Two facts rather rule out any intended link. First, that there is now a 
school on the site and second, the orphanage was deliberately built in a 
pleasant and spacious area to create a positive base for the young people 
growing up there.

Completely OT, it is ironic and sad that Stockwell tube station, just a 
hundred yards or so from the orphanage site, projected this place into 
the headlines in 2005 when the police shot and killed the innocent Brazilian 
worker, Jean Charles de Menezes, in the paranoid aftermath of the 7/7 
London bombings.