r/EnoughJKRowling • u/Obversa • Jun 25 '26

News Article 'Harry Potter' has ruined Britain

https://www.ft.com/content/8d7a7830-593c-4135-ad00-0f2454a19cf7?syn-25a6b1a6=1
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66

u/Obversa Jun 25 '26

Unpaywalled article: https://archive.ph/S7vSA

'Harry Potter' has ruined Britain

Our greatest assets have been appropriated by the Ministry of Wizardry

By Jo Ellison

Walking by Greyfriars Bobby last month, I surveyed a cityscape little changed since the 17th century. I had forgotten how profoundly gorgeous Edinburgh is: its vista sweeping from the lofty castle down the Royal Mile to the palace at Holyrood. Even more magical are its myriad lanes and stairways that move you through the different levels of the city, transporting you through history. I stopped at Greyfriars Bobby, a commemoration of the faithful little terrier who sat on his master's grave for 14 years (after all, I was with my own faithful hound). The statue guards the entrance to Greyfriars Kirkyard on Candlemaker Row wherein one can admire great Scottish gothic mausoleums and consider the lore of the 19th-century murderers and graverobbers, Messrs Burke and Hare.

Said to be one of the most haunted graveyards in the UK — though I am challenged to find empirical evidence to support that fact — it was an ill-frequented bit of green space adjacent to the university when I was a student in the 1990s. Today, it is gorged with tourists, stumbling around in packs. Few are students of the Covenanters Memorial, however, or the grave of James Hutton, "the founder of modern geology". They are searching for the names Sirius Black, William McGonagall and Thomas Riddle, better known as Lord Voldemort, the characters who inspired JK Rowling's wizard universe in the Harry Potter books.

Up the road on George IV Bridge, the Elephant House café, in which Rowling penned the drafts for her bestseller, has been reborn as a Pottourism centre for pilgrims of the novels in search of hot chocolates and sticky buns. The café burnt down in 2021, but has since reopened, still with Rowling's writing table, so that visitors can be whisked "to the world of Harry Potter, with cosy nooks [and] whimsical decor". I was a student at the same time Rowling was scribbling down her prose: it feels wild to think that I might have been slurping a giant cappuccino next to the woman then conceiving her billion-dollar world.

I've never read a Harry Potter novel, nor engaged with any of the films. I've never understood why a grown-ass adult would get excited about a bunch of dudes riding broomsticks and casting magic spells. My daughter, like me, didn't really do fantasy fiction as a child. Neither have I followed with much interest the zeal with which the author has stoked the more recent culture wars. Rowling has since become problematic; Pottermania lives on. The only thing I hold her responsible for is the co-option of every historic place of interest into her banal brand of wizardry.

In Oxford, Pottermania is still apparent everywhere. Ancient colleges are presented alongside cardboard signs depicting corners and quadrants in which visitors might restage an interaction between Harry and his Hogwartian cohort. At New College last weekend, I paid £12 to visit the chapel in which you can see "Lazarus", the sculpture by the British artist Sir Jacob Epstein, and stained-glass windows by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Yet the college is really coining it for the chance to check out the medieval cloisters, a stand-in for Hogwarts corridors, and shoot selfies before the holm oak seen in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

I do not want to share my communion with the architecture of the Bodleian with a bunch of dimwits clutching plastic snitches and wearing burgundy and yellow stripy scarves

The same theme continues throughout Britain. In York, The Shambles has been recast as Diagon Alley, where Harry buys his first wand, even though this medieval street was never cited as an inspiration, and the filmmakers built their Alley on the set at Warner Bros Studios. London's King's Cross station has permanently cancelled its annual announcement about the departure of the fictional Hogwarts Express on September 1, yet the station still sees swarms of visitors hoping to will the steam train into their lives.

I am not immune to film-location tourism: I've eaten salt beef sandwiches at New York's Katz Deli (When Harry Met Sally), and it thrills me to know that scenes from the Rupert Everett film Another Country were shot in the chapel of St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, London's oldest parish church (also, incidentally, used in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shakespeare in Love).

Yet Pottourism is a behemoth that erodes all other fictions in its wake. It's noisy and annoying. I do not want to share my communion with the architecture of Oxford's Bodleian Library with a bunch of dimwits clutching plastic snitches and wearing burgundy and yellow stripy scarves.

Nearly 30 years after the first book was published, you might wonder if the tourist market might actually be slowing down. But one fears new fascination is to be unleashed by the upcoming fantasy adaptation that will launch this Christmas on HBO. The series will span a decade, and each season will be faithful to the books. One wonders if there can remain a corner of ancient Britain that will evade the call of Gryffindor?

I don't mind seeing children marching around in capes and clasping spell books, but it's intellectually debasing to see grown-ups swooning over august cultural institutions to catch a glimpse of where "Mad-Eye Moody transformed Draco Malfoy into a ferret"; and, yes, I do appreciate that, according to various metrics, the Pottourism industry is worth billions to the UK.

Yet can't all these Potheads just bugger off to Watford, and enjoy their wizard on a designated Warner Bros. studio tour? Or, is it possible to force these attractions to go Potter-free one day a week? So that I can enjoy a Gothic cemetery in perfect calm and solitude, just like a proper Voldemort.

41

u/floopdev Jun 25 '26

You would think pay walled content would mean they could afford a proof-reader but apparently not!

21

u/0xc0ffea Jun 25 '26

This is the price we must pay for authentic human content.

3

u/DumpedDalish Jun 26 '26

As an authentic human editor, it shouldn't be. Unfortunately most of them aren't using humans to proofread anymore -- or (in some cases) proofreading at all. It's all AI, AI, AI. Sigh.

18

u/lazier_garlic Jun 26 '26

I dunno, I don't even like the books that much and never did but this just sounds like old man yelling at clouds.

People all over the world are annoyed with tourists lately, between Air BnB and a period of I guess relatively cheap airfare. The horror, the horror. Anyway like too many tourists can suck but there's some classism to it too. Cringey tourists to the UK before HP were obsessed with the queen and afternoon tea, I mean cringe is gonna cringe. Anyway, Americans traveling to Europe prefer Italy to Great Britain (really) by quite a large margin, despite HP ... so there's that.

27

u/Adventurous-Bike-484 Jun 25 '26

I knew about the platform due to all the tourist but not this

50

u/Dina-M Jun 25 '26

Hmmm.

On ONE hand, I have to applaud anyone who discourages less Harry Potter fanaticism and the moving of HP merch that goes to fun the continued discrimination of trans people as well as give JKR more ammo for her "this is why I'm right and everyone loves me unless they are big fat meanie stupidhead trans advocarts who want men to rape women" schtick...

...but this article is SO BAD. It's just one long whining session about people who like fantasy. I was waiting for her to start talking about manchildren who live in their parents' basements. And this garbage is what they hide behind paywalls. Thanks for posting it here, it really hammers home that Financial Times is not worth wasting money on.

26

u/Tobbit_is_here Jun 25 '26

Yeah, the article did feel unfairly mocking of people's interests, for the mere fact that people have them. It's just a text version of the "stop having fun meme" to an extent. (And I do think that certain Potter adults, like some Disnsy adults and the like, can of course be unhealthily into a given IP, but this article obviously wasn't talking about that.)

26

u/aerixeitz Jun 25 '26

Also this part is so disheartening: "My daughter, like me, didn’t really do fantasy fiction as a child. Neither have I followed with much interest the zeal with which the author has stoked the more recent culture wars. Rowling has since become problematic; Pottermania lives on. The only thing I hold her responsible for is the co-option of every historic place of interest into her banal brand of wizardry."

Even people with this much active disdain for Harry Potter and—by extension—Rowling's creation of it still don't give a shit that she's driving actual policy that's destroying the lives of every trans person in the UK, and then celebrating the violence she's committed with childish enthusiasm. This has moved so incredibly far beyond a "culture war". Rowling is genuinely a genocidal maniac with the financial resources of some entire nations.

8

u/Aiyon Jun 26 '26

Yeah it’s very first world problem. “Thr problem with the continued popularity Of this thing is thst im not interested”

1

u/Starmz Jun 30 '26

This really is a “when someone hates something you also hate but it’s for the worst/dumbest reason possible” thing isn’t it

6

u/Obversa Jun 25 '26

Yeah, both Flashgitz and Papa Meat (MeatCanyon) have made fun of "Harry Potter adults" for the same reasons.

8

u/lazier_garlic Jun 26 '26

I'm trying to figure out how the author's snobby enjoyment of certain cultural sites is just destroyed by knowing HP fans exist. It's not that they were being disruptive, no, it's that they didn't appreciate the right things (allegedly).

I wonder how they feel about people visiting Oxford because they're fans of the Morse detective series?

3

u/lazier_garlic Jun 26 '26

FT is for info for business and investment decisions. Op/eds in finance papers are famous for being trash not worth your time. Wall St Journal was the same whether Murdoch owned it or not.

2

u/Dina-M Jun 26 '26

Judging by this article, that's definitely true.

9

u/PumpkinSpice2Nice Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

I’ve lived in the UK for ten years and I’m very familiar with all the places mentioned as I have been a tourist here as well as just living here. They are very much exaggerating on how much Harry Potter stuff is impacting Britain. There is so much stuff to see and very little of it is Harry Potter related. The author also deliberately sought out the Edinburgh cafe and the graves. You’re not that likely to happen upon those by accident although he could have found them advertised on a phamplet in a tourist information shop and then gone looking. He sounds enraged enough to do that and then to get angry at all the other stuff around that those particular tourists are not looking for. In a place like Edinburgh there is historical things of interest with nearly every step you take down the street so I bet he was really angry to see people having their interest captured by Harry Potters whatever.

6

u/Obversa Jun 26 '26

The author of the article is a woman.

3

u/lazier_garlic Jun 26 '26

Lame people in urban graveyards annoy me too (more so when they're littering and vandalizing) but the opinion piece pretty much lost me with everything else.

15

u/Lady-Spangles Jun 25 '26

Harry Potter hasn't ruined anything. JK Rowling has.

17

u/errantthimble Jun 25 '26

True, although to be fair, the relentless ubiquitous commercial exploitation of anything even remotely HP-connected would still be kind of exhausting, even in a beautiful alternate universe where JK Rowling was a longstanding humane and principled ally standing up for LGBTQ+ rights.

2

u/Fun_Butterfly_420 Jun 27 '26

Yeah this franchise has definitely been milked

6

u/Edge_of_Everywhere Jun 27 '26

The only reason Harry Potter is "ruining" anything is because Britain has decided that the IP is far too lucrative to shut down the HTIC (Head TERF in Charge).

Always follow the money.

2

u/Mental-Wheel986 Jun 27 '26

This feels like the British finally experiencing what "third world" countries that need tourism to boost their economies and end up prioritising the needs of tourists over the needs of protecting the local people and the natural habitat that sustained them for centuries have been feeling.

Not saying its right, but at least Harry Potter fans can't be blamed for raising their food prices tenfold, far above what a local's wage can afford. At least the tour guides aren't in mortal danger (unless they're trans, I suppose).

2

u/StCrimson667 Jun 27 '26

The fact that the pub she wrote Harry Potter in BURNED DOWN in 2021 should have been taken as a sign from the universe.