There’s an old stone building with gothic architecture and, inside, a labyrinth of nooks and crannies begging to be explored in games of hide and seek.
Below the floorboards there’s a secret cellar, complete with trapdoor, where spiders, cobwebs and spooky shadows lurk — just the place for a ghost story.
The description of this 19th-century, Grade II-listed property, in a picturesque village in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, might conjure up images of Hogwarts — the fictional school of magic from the Harry Potter books. In reality, however, it harbours even more significance to J.K. Rowling than the novels that made her famous.
The house in question is Church Cottage, her childhood home. Scrawled on the window ledge in one of the bedrooms is the priceless insignia: ‘Rowling slept here circa 1982’ — as if there was any doubt as to its salubrious history.
It was revealed recently that Rowling had secretly bought the house she grew up in. The notoriously private author and her anaesthetist husband, Dr Neil Murray, are believed to have purchased the home for £399,950 in 2011 through Edinburgh-based company Caernarfon Lettings Ltd, of which Rowling is listed as a person in ‘significant control’ and Dr Murray a director.
The notoriously private author and her anaesthetist husband, Dr Neil Murray, are believed to have purchased the home (pictured) in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, for £399,950 in 2011
It was revealed recently that Rowling (pictured in 2018) had secretly bought the house she grew up in
Church Cottage — which was originally built as a school but converted into a residential dwelling at the turn of the 20th century — has vaulted ceilings and even a cupboard under the stairs, just like the one Harry was holed up in by his evil Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon before he arrived at Hogwarts.
After apparently being left unoccupied for much of the past eight years, Rowling, 54, was granted planning permission to restore it to its former glory in January. As one might expect from a woman worth around £750 million, no expense is being spared.
Modern floorboards will be replaced with reclaimed pine versions to match the originals and the eye-catching red and beige diamond-pattern quarry tiles in the dining room rejuvenated. Outside, plastic pipes will be swapped for costly cast-iron equivalents. Metal casements around the windows will be restored, with the historic crown glass retained.
Although halted because of the coronavirus lockdown, the renovation project is well under way. ‘The scaffolding is up and work has commenced. Over the past month there have been tradespeople in and around the property, and they’ve taken the roof off,’ villager Katie Pingree, 43, told the Mail.
‘It’s stood empty for a while and it’s going to look nice — though not everyone feels that way.’
Some are questioning why Rowling would want to buy a house in a village she has long professed to have been miserable living in.
Having famously survived on £69-a-week benefits as a single mother in the 1990s, while writing the first of her seven Harry Potter books in an Edinburgh cafe, many believe Rowling has been outwardly disdainful of the Middle England type of community her childhood village espouses.
In a 2012 interview with The Guardian she said: ‘We’re a phenomenally snobby society.’
She went on to say: ‘It’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.’
Church Cottage — which was originally built as a school but converted into a residential dwelling at the turn of the 20th century — has vaulted ceilings and even a cupboard under the stairs (pictured), just like the one Harry was holed up in by his evil Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon before he arrived at Hogwarts
She centred the plot of her 2012 novel The Casual Vacancy on the West Country town of Pagford, a town widely construed as a fictionalised version of the area.
In the novel, she pilloried the residents who lived there as small-minded snobs and busybodies. ‘There is an element of negative people thinking ‘Why is she doing it now?’ because previously she had been quite vocal about not having the happiest of childhoods in the area,’ says Katie Pingree.
Indeed, in September 2012 Rowling said: ‘This was very much me vividly remembering what it was like to be a teenager, and it wasn’t a particularly happy time. In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.’
Then there is the question of why she seems to have waited for nine years to renovate Church Cottage, prompting one disgruntled local on a community Facebook page to remark: ‘Time for her to sell it. She shouldn’t have kept it empty all this time when a family could live in it and love it.’
In addition to her 162-acre estate in Perthshire, Scotland, Rowling, the world’s richest author, owns a townhouse in London’s exclusive Kensington and a £2 million home in Edinburgh. The £399,950 she allegedly spent on her childhood home, then, is small change in comparison.
‘Maybe there’s an element of jealousy,’ says Pingree, who, like Rowling, went to Wyedean secondary school in nearby Sedbury. ‘People are saying she only wants to do it so no one else can buy it and make money off the back of her.’
Pingree insists, however: ‘The fact she’s restoring the cottage and bringing back its original features is a positive for everyone.’
So why does this house mean so much to Rowling? And why is she suddenly so determined to preserve and protect it?
Arguably, Rowling’s love for her mother, Anne — who died in this home of multiple sclerosis aged just 45 — plays a large part in her wanting to maintain the childhood memories it evokes. Pictured: her parents’ 1964 wedding
Despite her famous philanthropy (she lost her billionaire status because she’s given so much to charity) her reasons are as likely to be personal as altruistic.
Arguably, Rowling’s love for her mother, Anne — who died in this home of multiple sclerosis aged just 45 — plays a large part in her wanting to maintain the childhood memories it evokes.
Perhaps, too, does a desire to put her well-documented fractured relationship with her father, Peter, behind her. In an interview with the New Yorker Magazine in 2012 she said: ‘I did not have an easy relationship with my father.’
When chat-show host Oprah Winfrey asked her in 2010 if she thought she would ever make peace with her father, the mother of three said: ‘No, I don’t. I think that it’s such a huge thing to be estranged from a parent, there would have to be very big reasons for that and I have my reasons.
‘It wasn’t a good relationship from my point of view, for a very long time.’
Rowling became estranged from Peter after he auctioned off signed copies of her books.
That was in 2003, however. Maybe enough time has passed to temper any lingering resentment. Maybe, after so long seemingly distancing herself from her childhood memories, Rowling is ready to embrace them again.
Scrawled on the window ledge in one of the bedrooms is the priceless insignia: ‘Rowling slept here circa 1982’ — as if there was any doubt as to its salubrious history
Peter, now 75 and a retired engineer, bought the house in 1974, when Rowling — real name Joanne — was nine and her sister, Diane, seven. Until then, the girls’ childhood on the outskirts of Bristol had been happy and Rowling was already showing signs of being a gifted, imaginative child.
‘From the age of three, Joanne could read a newspaper article or book. She was always writing plays and stories for her friends and sister to read and perform,’ Peter recalled. He and Joanne’s mum loved to read the girls Noddy, Wind In The Willows and Thomas the Tank Engine books.
Yet when the family moved to the close-knit community in the Forest of Dean, Joanne found it tough. Aged nine, she was at an age at which children are starting to form deep friendships and can be susceptible to peer pressure.
In her 2012 interview with New Yorker Magazine, she said: ‘My voice wasn’t Forest of Dean, although it became Forest of Dean pretty damn quickly.’
Despite her feelings of alienation, it is easy to see how her new home might have fired Rowling’s imagination. Julian Mercer, a TV producer who bought the property from the family in 1995 for £84,000, described the architecture as ‘very Hogwartslike’.
Yet in real life, tragedy was unfurling. When Rowling was 12, Anne fell ill, the first clue her body wasn’t functioning when she struggled to pick up a teapot.
Rowling was always close to her mother. ‘Anne was there for the girls, while I was away at work a lot,’ Peter later recalled.
A bookish teen who went on to be head girl, Rowling took her studies seriously, with her English teacher Steve Eddy saying in 2007 her ‘work always showed impressive imagination and in class she was bright and enthusiastic’.
Yet there was a rebelliousness, too. In The Casual Vacancy there is a restless teenager called Andrew, whom Rowling admits exhibits parallels with her own life. ‘Andrew’s romantic idea that he’ll go and live among the graffiti and broken windows of London: that was me,’ she said in 2012. ‘I thought: ‘I have to get away from this place.’ ‘
Describing her adolescence a ‘dreadful time of life’, Rowling has recalled, nonetheless, how her mum maintained an indefatigable optimism. Last week parish councillor Sheila Bollen, who ran the store where Anne used to buy her daughters’ school uniform, said Rowling had ‘no idea she was unwell until right to the end’. Rowling, who had graduated from Exeter University in 1986, learned her mother had died, on New Year’s Eve in 1990, while holidaying with an ex-boyfriend.
‘She died at home of respiratory failure. She was 45, and I still can’t write about her without crying,’ Rowling said.
In 2010, she founded the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic at the University of Edinburgh with a gift of £10 million in her mother’s memory.
Shattered, she moved to Portugal to work as an English teacher shortly afterwards, embarking on a volatile relationship with journalist Jorge Arantes, with whom she had a daughter, Jessica.
Meanwhile, Peter started a relationship with divorced secretary Janet Gallivan, with whom he worked. They married in 1993.
The same year, Rowling left Arantes and moved with Jessica to live with her sister in Edinburgh, where she famously survived on benefits while writing Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, which was published in 1997.
She dedicated the book to her mother, sister and daughter, with no mention of her father.
Peter and his daughter repaired their relationship enough for Rowling to invite him to her 2001 wedding to Dr Murray, with whom she now has two teenage children. Two of only 14 guests, Peter and his second wife were flown to Scotland by private jet and picked up from the airport in limos.
How much more it must have hurt, then, for Rowling to discover two years later that her father was selling first-edition copies of her work — signed ‘Lots of love from your firstborn’ — at Sotheby’s.
Peter, who pocketed £50,000 for four books, later said he had forewarned his daughter he needed to auction the books to cover debts, admitting she was ‘livid’.
Then, in 2012, Rowling suggested to an interview with the New Yorker magazine that they’d fallen out before Peter auctioned her books — over what, it’s not known. ‘We’ve not had any communication for about nine years.’
Confusingly, Peter was insisting everything was fine, telling a Mail on Sunday reporter: ‘Everything is good. There is no problem any more.’
Maybe buying her childhood home in 2011 provided the thawing in relations between the two.
Or maybe the clue lies in an interview Rowling gave in 2012, when she spoke about her French ancestry, on her mother’s side. Revealing how her great-grandfather had won a Croix de Guerre award for his bravery in World War I, Rowling made perhaps her most telling comment on her motive.
‘I married someone who’s got a vast Scottish family — a clan, really — which is fabulous. But I wanted to have something I could show my children and say: ‘Look, I also have a family, I also have a background.’ ‘
And now she has a childhood home, packed with memories, that she can share.
Additional reporting: Stephanie Condron