Intimate Immensity: Grimmauld Place and the Magic of Resistance
The secret warmth between numbers 11 and 13
Of all the spooky places in Harry Potter I always found 12 Grimmauld Place – London residence for the Black family, repurposed by the Order of the Phoenix – the most compelling. A grey townhouse with ‘grimy windows’, it’s wedged between Muggle-inhabited numbers 11 and 13 on an Islington terrace, who put the absence of number 12 down to a numbering mistake and remain oblivious to the secret house producing itself next door. Harry first goes there at the beginning of Book Five and eavesdrops on the meetings of the clandestine Order as it plots the resistance against Voldemort.
It's an aristocratic English house of the worst kind: gloomily formal, devoid of warmth and decorated repulsively – the ‘shrunken heads’ of the house-elves who have served the Blacks are mounted up the stairs, while Kreacher, loyal to Sirius’s mother, lives on, muttering with malevolent prejudice. There’s a preoccupation with heraldry and ancestry: the front door’s silver knocker is shaped as a ‘twisted serpent’, and the walls of Regulus Black’s bedroom are hung with a tapestry depicting the ‘noble and most ancient house of Black’ with its horrible pseudo-Norman motto, Toujours Pur.1
At first sight, 12 Grimmauld Place seems the icy opposite of the warmest location in Harry Potter: The Burrow, family home of the Weasleys. Harry arrives there, by flying car, at the start of Book Two, and returns throughout the series. The Burrow replaces 12 Grimmauld Place’s stiff Regency grandeur with a vernacular architecture of cheerful improvisation – seeing the house for the first time, Harry imagines it must have evolved from ‘a large stone pigpen’, with rooms added haphazardly, story by story, until the whole thing is ‘so crooked it looked as though it were held up by magic’. Crookedness extends to the Weasleys’ garden, too, which (unlike Uncle Vernon’s immaculate lawn in suffocatingly respectable Privet Drive) is tangled with weeds and flanked by ‘gnarled trees’. Where 12 Grimmauld Place hoards the empty honour of pure-blood heritage, The Burrow overflows with the warmth of living clutter: turning up with Dumbledore in Book Six Harry is comforted by the ‘familiar litter of old Wellington boots and rusty cauldrons’ around the door.
Yet warmth is kindled even in the unfriendly, high-ceilinged rooms of 12 Grimmauld Place. Not the homely warmth of The Burrow, but the thrill of a secret resistance. I remember feeling delighted as a child that the Order had this centre of operation – not only because it kept them and Harry safe, but also because the idea seemed so exciting, a place where you can hide away from the authorities, conspiring together to a secret end.
Intimate Immensity
Just as The Burrow gives Harry a glimpse of the loving family he never had, so 12 Grimmauld Place – even after the fall of the Ministry, and the shattering of the Order – provides a zone for the flame of the resistance not to go out. Familial intimacy makes way for public, if clandestine, comradeship. And there’s a direct link between the two locations in Molly Weasley, who carries into 12 Grimmauld Place some of the warmth that suffuses her own household. When Dumbledore delivers Harry to The Burrow it’s late at night, and Molly Weasley rustles him up some ‘thick, steaming onion soup’. In Book Seven Harry hides at 12 Grimmauld Place with only Ron and Hermione, and buys some co-operation from Kreacher by giving him Regulus’s locket; the house-elf serves them lunch, ladling out ‘soup into pristine bowls’ – it’s ‘French onion’.
In The Poetics of Space (1958) the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard coins the term ‘intimate immensity’, for the inner vastness we feel when we relax into stillness and allow ourselves to daydream. Intimate immensity is the realm of the poetic, where the deep focus of interior space and the magnitude of the exterior seem to combine: ‘to give an object poetic space is to give it more space than it has objectivity’. It follows then that we will find intimate immensity in those domestic spaces where the mind has been permitted to daydream – in places like The Burrow, where an intense happiness of being (Arthur Weasley, tinkering in his shed with beloved Muggle objects) flourishes in the endless uneven nooks and crannies.
The world of Harry Potter is so full of intimate immensity that it begins to seem as if Rowling’s ‘magic’ is a synonym for Bachelard’s ‘daydream’. Countless objects and dwelling-places appear magically bigger on the inside: the tent where Harry camps with the Weasleys at the Quidditch World Cup in Book Four; Hermione’s bag in Book Seven, magically expanded by an Engorging Charm so that it has very obviously ‘more space than it has objectivity’; Diagon Alley, the bright stretch of bustling commercial life in the heart of wizarding London. And Hagrid’s hut, an island of warmth and friendship (tea and rock cake) on the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
In 12 Grimmauld Place the highly subjective property which Bachelard is identifying in certain daydream-friendly places, at once very big and very small, is given a literal, magic form: the building literally can’t be found by the unfamiliar, and the secret activities of the association within it pass beneath the radar. In the language of the Wizarding World the house has the property of ‘Unplottability’: it can’t be seen by outsiders, or located on a map. Hogwarts Castle, like all magical schools, is unplottable; on the seventh floor there’s the Room of Requirement, perhaps the most beguiling place in all of Harry Potter, where the seeker finds whatever they need. In Book Five Harry uses the Room as headquarters for his friends’ secret society; returning in Book Seven he finds them there, resisting the Death Eaters from what Seamus calls a ‘proper hideout’ – an unplottable place within an unplottable place.
London’s Secret Spaces
It’s not just our cities which are under constant surveillance, by foreign and domestic intelligence services; in the smartphone era, it’s our own lives too. Every day we give our consent for the movements of our eyeballs to be tracked and studied by mysterious and inscrutable authorities who, as Shoshana Zuboff argued in the book that coined the term ‘surveillance capitalism’, know more about us than a truly democratic system can really sustain. There’s a great romance, in this world of unprecedentedly thorough surveillance, to the idea of inscrutable spaces – pockets of concealment where, like the intimate immensities of Harry Potter, private activity can escape the notice of the authorities.
Anyone who loved Harry Potter as a child and comes to London has found themselves walking its streets daydreaming about what magic might be occurring in their silent houses. So many inscrutable façades, however loud or grand their architecture; so many dark first-floor windows, ‘grimy’ or spotless, where the sight of half a chandelier, imperceptibly swaying, catches the eye and triggers a spiralling, insatiable curiosity…
Scattered throughout London, however, are buildings who disguise, or simply conceal, their secret function. But the clandestine activity they hide and support is most likely under the purview of the state, not its enemies – like the wonderful Slough House of Slow Horses, a monument to mid-century British institutional architecture with its dingy corridors and galley kitchens and endless stacks of paper. Yet if London lacks a 12 Grimmauld Place, it at least thrives with buildings whose form, if not their function, defy with their characterful strangeness the rationalising and homogenising energies of contemporary capitalism. London’s unusually gradual and haphazard evolution, and its original organisation as a twinning of two cities and a cluster of satellite villages, offers to the walkers of its streets the continual surprise of places which seem far too low-key, small and intimate for their centrality in a major world city. I walked home from Kings’ Cross (where Harry’s journey into the magical world begins, and where he hovers between life and death at the end), and I saw these two terraced houses clinging to each other on Pentonville Road, dwarfed by the roar of its traffic five feet away across the pavement, and by huge towers of the future rising behind them.
Whatever happens here – probably someone very rich eats and sleeps – happens less than a hundred metres from the square used for the exterior of 12 Grimmauld Place in the filming of Harry Potter.
Resisting
Against the backdrop of the terrible things that happened this year – the cruel and futile wars that rage on, and the re-election of Donald Trump – I thought about the nature of resistance. I’m a subscriber to the Substack of Bill McKibben, one of the western world’s most significant climate campaigners. I was inspired not just by how tirelessly he appeared to be working in the run-up to the American election, which he rightly framed as potentially pivotal for the future of the planet, but also by how undaunted he seems in the aftermath of the disastrous result. His work continues. It reminds me of a beautiful insight by Vaclav Havel, dissident against the Soviet empire and later President of Czechoslovakia. Hope, says Havel, is a state of the soul, not a state of the world. True hope doesn’t require evidence; it defies the evidence.
I wrote a lot these past few months about a kind of menace much milder and more pervasive than distant wars and the return of Trump, though not unconnected with either: the continual assault by Silicon Valley on the capacity and quality of our attention. The smartphone is more than a tool: it encodes and prompts a certain mode of behaviour – an anxious, grasping, distracted, self-enclosed way of being. (If you still think it’s just a tool, I’d recommend the Substack of L.M. Sacasas, who writes brilliantly and with real depth about the history and philosophy of technology.) I’m preoccupied with looking for ways to push back against how the smartphone wants us to behave. Sometimes it feels ludicrous, tasteless even, to frame this non-submission to the smartphone as a kind of resistance.
But maybe resistance is the right word. A few times this year I explored the notion that the worst thing about the smartphone is not that it deconditions us from sustained, disciplined attention. (This is a classic criticism, and it’s classic because it’s true.) Perhaps the worst thing about the phone and its apps, I suggested, is that it keeps us not from focused attention but from its opposite – reverie, mind-wandering, daydreaming. The apps hypnotise and make us passive but they also keep us rooted to a floating present whose horizons seem unalterable. Resistance it is!
Havel’s idea of hope – a state of the soul, not a state of the world – relates, I think, to the importance of the imagination. Hope’s disdain for present reality points to its reliance on the imagination: hope, we could say, is something you dream up. This takes us all the way back to Harry Potter, and perhaps says something about the way Rowling connects the imagination to an ethics, or even a theology.2 The greatest intimate immensity in Harry Potter is the secret space in a person’s inner life where the warmth of human connection – even with those who are gone, never to return, whose spirits live on in memory and fantasy – is kept defiantly alive. That’s a Christmas idea, too: the spark of warmth, of life, in the cold bleakness all around. Thanks for reading however much of these essays you did, and have a very happy Christmas.
Kreacher tells Sirius (who is, ironically, just as hostile to him as his mother, presumably, was haughty and domineering) that his life’s purpose is to ‘serve the noble house of Black’ – ‘and it’s getting blacker every day, it’s filthy’, Sirius cuts in. Kreacher acknowledges the wordplay waspishly (‘Master always liked his little joke’). Sirius’s joke is a good one, because it’s two puns in one. Black, surname of a venerable wizarding family, runs together with the soot and grime on the windows and walls. But so also do two meanings of the word ‘house’: an aristocratic metonym for an ancient, supposedly uncorrupted bloodline, and the bricks-and-mortar sense of a physical dwelling place. Kreacher, like the rest of Sirius’s family, favour the abstraction of an aristocratic ‘House’ over the more wholesome pleasures of a present-day, material ‘house’.
One of the most overlooked aspects of the world of Harry Potter is that the contemporary wizarding world is one of agnostics. No one seems to believe in God, and certainly not in an afterlife. Some have found ways, variously benign and evil, to delay or work around death – but no magic can confer true immortality. Rowling inserts magic into a world without eschatology in order to create an agnosticism of a post-Christian kind, in which what survives of Christianity, and of us, is love.