Why did #Strike decide to rent an office in the mecca for musicians, Denmark Street? Here's author Robert Galbraith on the connection between Strike and the iconic London street. pic.twitter.com/J78VbDWhnq
— Robert Galbraith (@RGalbraith) July 13, 2021
“Denmark Street fits Strike like a glove, because, obviously, his parentage. He comes from in some ways from Rock n Roll Royalty but he’s never lived that life, and yet he’s gravitated to Denmark Street. And Robin might be calling him on that at some point in the future.
“It is an iconic street. And it is a place clearly that he feels at home, though I’m not sure he’s ever thought that through. Because he grew up being dragged around concerts by a passionate Rock fan and a groupie. So to operate out of a place where the buskers are constantly playing is, so this is home to him, yeah.
“But I love Denmark Street. I know it of old and used to live quite near there and it’s just one of those iconic places that I hope is not about to disappear though I fear for its future.”
Beatrice Groves, in her exegesis of Rowling’s choice of Charing Cross Road, has pointed out the importance of Denmark Street to Robin rather than Strike, that is to her what the Leaky Cauldron was to Harry Potter, and to The Presence herself as well:
More recently Rowling has spoken of how setting Strike’s offices on Denmark St was not a random choice, any more than was the placing of the Leaky Cauldron in Charing Cross Road. For Rowling, like Robin, once temped in Denmark Street: ‘I was sent to an office in Denmark Street years ago, and I was only there a week, and I loosely based Strike’s offices on that place where I temped.’ This was the first time that Rowling has mentioned her personal connection with this area of London and it makes sense that this might have been the time in her life when she got to know, via perusal in her lunch breaks, the bookshops of Charing Cross Road….
In sending Robin to temp in the office where she herself once temped, Rowling is doing something more than simply using a location which is familiar to her. For Strike’s office is to Robin what the Leaky Cauldron was to Harry: it is her portal of transformation. It will take her from the loveless, conventional life by which she feels stifled, and into her dream career. Matthew shares with the Dursleys both his obsession with the gaze of others, and in the desire to quash anything unconventional, anything of which those others might disapprove, out of the person whose behaviour might reflect badly on him. Matthew’s attempt to keep Robin away from the job for which she longs precisely echoes the Dursleys’ attempt to crush the magic out of Harry. It seems likely that it is no mere coincidence that the place that transports Harry from the Muggle to the magical world should be next-door to the place that transports Robin into the life she has always wanted.
Wordsworth writes that ‘there are in our existence spots of time,/ That with distinct pre-eminence retain/ A renovating virtue.’ I can’t help wondering whether Rowling has placed the gateways into her heroes’ dreams at precisely this location because she connects that particular ‘spot of time’ in her life, that time when she was temping in London the late 1980s, with the fulfilment of her own dreams. My hunch is that Rowling connects that time, and place, in her life with the crystallising of her own transformative dream to become a writer.
Rowling in today’s short comment talks about the Strike connection to Denmark Street, a side street to Charing Cross famous for its guitar stores and past clubs, the latter all closed (Strike’s address was in the not so distant past a notable one; see my post about dropping by Strike’s premises and favorite pub in 2016). The most exciting part of her asides here, I think, for Serious Strikers is the near confirmation in them that our prediction that the Agency will be forced to move from Denmark Street in Strike6 (and that Joe North’s home would be a perfect fit).
The eviction and search for new digs would be the perfect occasion for Robin to explore with Strike why he chose Denmark Street in the first place — and to suggest, when he neglects the obvious connection, that it was because an avenue that was Rock n Roll heaven at the time of his parents’ meeting felt like home to the recently demobbed soldier. My choice for the place for them to have this conversation is one closer than even Charing Cross Road or the Tottenham pub, namely the Church of St Giles in the Fields, the remarkable and beautiful building and grounds of which, though never mentioned in the books, are only a few steps and just across the street from the Agency’s entrance.
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Regent Sound Studios was also on Denmark Street. It was where the Rolling Stones recorded their debut album.
I know there’s a lot of fans who speculate that Rokeby was modeled after Mick Jagger, so it’s possible that the Deadbeats also recorded their albums there. We learned in Troubled Blood that Boy Cormoran meets Rokeby for the first time at a recording studio, a meeting in which the Rock Star rejects his illegitimate off-spring as an “accident.”
Could it be that Adult Cormoran wanted to start his business, something he’s proud of, to override the terrible association he had as a child on Denmark Street? Kind of like an “F–you, look at me now.”