The Real Magic

Real places are always more complicated—and more interesting—than the version we carry around in our heads.

Let’s get this out of the way first.

If you spend any amount of time in Durham, England without thinking about Harry Potter, you’re a stronger person than I am.

The cloisters of Durham Cathedral appeared in the films. Durham Castle rises above the River Wear. Stone pathways wind through the city. Around every corner there seems to be another archway, tower, staircase, or doorway that looks as though it belongs in a fantasy novel.

For a while, it feels enchanted. Then something unexpected happens.

The place becomes real.

I should probably admit that I’m not really a Harry Potter person.

I’m old enough that Harry Potter wasn’t the defining cultural event of my childhood. It belonged more to my younger sister, Maisie, and her friends than it ever belonged to me.

Yet, I watched from the sidelines as an entire generation became obsessed with the books, the movies, the midnight releases, the house sorting quizzes, and the endless debates about Snape.

At the time, it seemed like a lot of enthusiasm for a boarding school with remarkably poor adult supervision.

I thought about this more than once during my years working at a boarding school.

But at Durham University, I began to understand something I had missed.

The magic was never really about magic.

What people loved wasn’t Quidditch or wands or talking portraits.

They loved belonging.

They loved arriving somewhere that felt bigger than they were. They loved becoming part of a tradition. They loved the idea that every hallway carried memories and every generation inherited something from the one before it.

In other words, they loved exactly the things Durham University has in abundance.

But after spending time there, I don’t think people compare Durham to Hogwarts because of the architecture.

I think they compare Hogwarts to Durham.

One is a fictional place built around an ancient human longing.

The other is the real thing.

The easiest version of Durham is the one people already know.

The castle university. The place where students wear gowns to dinner and live in buildings older than most countries.

All of that is true.

None of it is the point.

The point, I think, is belonging.

The version where a place becomes part of your identity long after you’ve left it.

The version where traditions survive because ordinary people decide they’re worth preserving.

The version where a community outlasts any individual member of it.

I started to understand that at St Chad’s College.

Not while learning that Durham University is England’s third-oldest university or that it sits within a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I understood it while staring at a plaque on the wall of a study room that honors Mervyn Ellis.

Mervyn arrived at St Chad’s in 1948 and graduated in 1951. He died earlier this year at the age of ninety-eight.

For many years after graduation, he made the trip from Wakefield to Durham every Freshers’ Sunday, standing by the green door to welcome freshers as they entered the college for the first time.

If you’ve met me even for a second, you know this stopped me in my tracks.

We live in a culture obsessed with scale. We celebrate the founder. The CEO. The influencer.

The person with the biggest audience, the longest résumé, the most impressive title.

Meanwhile, a room at St. Chad’s is named after a man who spent decades showing up to welcome nervous eighteen-year-olds.

Of all the stories I heard while in Durham, it was the one I can’t stop thinking about.

Later in the day, archaeologist Dr. Richard Annis helped us understand the layers of history beneath our feet. In Durham, history isn’t confined to textbooks or museums. It is embedded in the streets, the buildings, and the landscape itself.

History is not something that happened here.

It continues here.

Later, Dr. Wendy Powers, Principal of University College, put words to an idea I had been struggling to articulate.

Students, she explained, are not owners.

They are custodians.

Temporary stewards of something much older than themselves.

The college was here before they arrived.

It will be here after they leave.

Their responsibility is simply to care for it while it is their turn.

Suddenly Mervyn Ellis made perfect sense.

He wasn’t preserving a tradition.

He was living out the responsibility of stewardship.

Long after he stopped being a student, Durham still felt partly entrusted to his care.

I can’t stop thinking about that because it feels increasingly rare.

And partly because it explains something I’ve been noticing throughout this trip.

I thought I was writing about universities.

Instead, I’ve found myself writing about ideas.

Belfast taught me that the most interesting places are complicated.

Bristol reminded me that curiosity matters more than certainty.

Newcastle reminded me that there is always another horizon worth exploring.

Durham taught me that we are temporary custodians of the places we love.

Those ideas don’t compete with one another.

They build on one another.

First, you learn that the world is more complicated than you thought.

Then you become curious enough to explore it.

Then you grow comfortable enough to admit you don’t have all the answers.

And eventually, if you’re lucky, you discover that the point was never to be the center of the story in the first place.

That may be what Durham’s collegiate system understands so well.

Every student belongs to both an academic department and a college.

The department teaches the subject. The college teaches belonging.

Students from every discipline live, study, eat, and socialize together, creating smaller communities within a larger university.

And perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than at the formal dinners held in Durham Castle.

Yes. Actual formal dinners. In Durham Castle.

On Wednesday, dressed in robes, we climbed winding stone staircases and entered a dining hall that has witnessed centuries of conversations, celebrations, friendships, and farewells. Candles flickered against ancient walls.

I wasn’t entirely prepared for how much I would enjoy it.

And somehow, through what I can only assume was an administrative oversight, I found myself seated at High Table alongside Dr. Wendy Powers.

If you don’t follow Dr. Powers on Instagram, you should.

I cannot overstate how much I loved this.

Not because it felt exclusive.

Not because it felt important.

But because it felt connected.

As someone who spends most of her days talking to teenagers about where they might spend the next four years of their lives, there was something remarkable about sitting in a room where generations of students had done exactly the same thing.

I can’t share much about the dinner without spoiling traditions (and I take this very seriously), but I can tell you there was a moment when someone spoke in Latin and—not shockingly—I remembered absolutely none of it.

But I loved it none the less.

On paper, the whole thing should have felt gimmicky.

A castle. Academic gowns. Formal hall. A High Table.

Instead, it was beyond wonderful.

Because the dinner wasn’t really about tradition.

It was about continuity.

The students filling the hall weren’t observing a tradition from a distance.

They were becoming part of it.

One of the strangest expectations we place on teenagers is that they’re supposed to decide who they want to become before they’ve had a chance to belong to very many places.

We ask them where they want to go.

What they want to study.

What they want to do.

We spend far less time asking a different question.

What kind of community do you want to join?

And once you’re there, what kind of steward will you be?