Room 11, Railview Hotel

• Type: Hotel Room
• Location: Railview Hotel, Cokeworth, England
• Owner/Residents: The hotel was managed by a stooping, toothless man. Temporary occupants included Harry Potter, Vernon Dursley, Petunia Dursley, and Dudley Dursley.
• Key Features: A gloomy, poorly-maintained room with an overpowering smell of damp and fried fish.

Room 11 was a specific room within the Railview Hotel, a “gloomy-looking” establishment located on the outskirts of the industrial town of Cokeworth. The Dursleys and Harry Potter checked into this hotel on a Sunday in late July 1991, as part of Vernon Dursley's increasingly frantic attempts to escape the flood of Hogwarts acceptance letters being sent to Harry. The room itself was spartan and unpleasant. It was furnished with only two beds and a single lumpy armchair. The air in the room was thick with the smell of “damp and fried fish.” Due to the limited bedding, Harry and his cousin, Dudley Dursley, were forced to share one bed, while Vernon and Petunia Dursley occupied the other. The family had a meager dinner of stale cornflakes and cold tinned tomatoes in the room before settling down for an uncomfortable night.

Room 11 represents a significant milestone in the Dursleys' failure to suppress Harry Potter's magical identity. It demonstrates the inescapable and highly specific nature of the magic used to deliver Hogwarts correspondence. Despite Vernon Dursley's belief that he had found a sufficiently obscure hiding place, the Wizarding World located Harry with precise accuracy. The morning after their arrival, about a hundred letters, each addressed to “Mr H. Potter, Room 11, Railview Hotel, Cokeworth,” were delivered to the hotel's front desk. This discovery horrified Vernon, who refused to let Harry get one and immediately checked the family out. The incident in Room 11 directly precipitated the family's final, most desperate move: fleeing to the remote Hut-on-the-Rock out at sea, where Rubeus Hagrid would ultimately find them on Harry's eleventh birthday.

• The Dursleys' choice of Cokeworth as a hiding place is deeply ironic. It is the same town where Petunia and her sister, Lily Evans, grew up, and where they first encountered a young Severus Snape. In fleeing from magic, the Dursleys inadvertently ran to a location central to Harry's family history and the origins of the First Wizarding War.
• In the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the stay at the Railview Hotel is omitted. The narrative transitions directly from the letters flooding the house at Number Four, Privet Drive to the family's journey to the Hut-on-the-Rock (film).