Harry Potter Studio Tour

The Warner Brothers studio where the Harry Potter movies were filmed sits just north of London. About a year ago, they opened up the sets to the public. I forced myself to wait 8 months until Christmas to buy tickets, since my family really wanted to come along, but it was worth the wait!

The entire experience was magical. Warner Bros. limits the number of people that can visit each day through advanced-purchased tickets, so it wasn’t crowded at all (unlike what I hear from Harry Potter World in Orlando). Plus the staff was very helpful and friendly; we could tell they were Potterphiles like us!

The tour began in a small cinema filled with HP movie posters from all over the world. It was fun trying to guess which country the posters were from while waiting for everyone to get their ticket stamped. Once everyone was inside and seated, we watched a short film introduction from Daniel, Emma, and Rupert. When they finished, the screen lifted and we realized we were outside the double doors to the Great Hall! A couple of lucky birthday kids got the honor of opening the doors so we could start our tour.

Once inside the Great Hall, a WB employee pointed out items like Rob Pattinson’s Hufflepuff uniform, the missing ceiling, and the professor’s costumes. Then she explained that the tour is self-guided. The average time spent in the studio is around 3 hours, but they did have one person take 9 hours to get through! There were a lot of fun things for kids to do, too, like find all of the golden snitches hidden around the studio, or complete the scavenger hunt. Like kids needed that stuff anyway! They were inside Harry Potter’s world!

We had a great time at the studio walking through the sets, drinking glasses of butterbeer, and even riding broomsticks over the (green-screen) Hogwarts campus. (Unfortunately cameras were not allowed in the green screen area but I will never forget Elizabeth, my dad, and me pretending to be wizards flying over London. Dad was definitely the oldest and biggest person to get on a broom, but he had the spirit of a kid!) 

We also learned a lot about movie-making, and all of the work it took to make the 8 films.  There was so much detail that went into the movie-making process, and even though most audiences probably never knew the half of it, it shows in the quality of the films. Here are some of our favorite tidbits:

The Great Hall was decorated for the holidays with Christmas trees and puddings and even crackers for each of the houses – like this one for Syltherin.  

For the first-ever scene in the Great Hall, the cast was served real food and the floating candles in the ceiling were real.  Well… after the hot wax started burning some kids and food spoiled after days of filming, the powers-that-be decided to use fake food and candles going forward.

David and me in the Great Hall.  You can see Harry’s first school uniform to my right and his last uniform on David’s left.  He grew from a tiny boy to a young man right before our eyes!

Not all actors had their hair styled for the movies.  In fact, most wore wigs.  From Snape, to the Malfoy’s, to Dumbledore and Sirius Black… and evil Bellatrix!

All of the books in Dumbledore’s office are British phonebooks rebound to look old.

Also inside Dumbledore’s office, the labels on the vials containing people’s memories are all hand-written. 

The animals inside the jars in the Potions classroom are from the London Zoo gift shop.

The Dursley’s home at 4 Privet Drive is based off of a house in Bracknell, the city outside London also famous for being the home of Dell UK.  Instead of continuing to drive out to Bracknell to film, they reconstructed the house on-set.

There were a lot of glasses made for Harry over the years, but Daniel Radcliffe took the originals with him as a souvenir after wrapping the series.  

Rupert Grint took the original ‘4’ from the Dursley’s home.

Hagrid was an animatronic!  For shots that didn’t require close-ups, a tall rugby player wore platform shoes and padded clothing to play the giant. He also wore an animatronic head to scale with the rest of his body and act as Hagrid’s double. Aragog, Hagrid's creepy pet spider, was also animatronic.

Other things you may have thought were CGI that were actually constructed were the revolving phoenix staircase, the Chamber of Secrets door, the Gringott’s vault door, and Mad Eye Moody’s chest.

Butterbeer is only sold in two locations in the world, and the WB Studios is one of them!  The recipe is a secret, but it tasted like cream soda mixed with butterscotch and topped with a thick, marshmallow cream.  Yum!

Diagon Alley was not only filmed within the studio, but also on the streets of London.

The Knight Bus was constructed out of two London double decker buses.

The painting of a young woman on the wall of the Gryffindor common room next to the staircase is actually a young Professor McGonagall.

The boy’s dorm room beds were built during the first film. Over the years, the actors outgrew them but new beds were never made. Instead, the cameramen just avoided any shots of their feet hanging off the ends.

Each main actor had a wand made of real wood just for them.  The wands were individually crafted to reflect the character they belonged to.

In order to give the behind-the-scenes cast some on-screen time, the paintings hanging around Hogwarts (like these two next to the sword of Gryffindor) are actually of people like the producers, writers, and other crew members that worked on the movies.

Working on a series of movies like Harry Potter must be a graphic designer’s dream!  They designed everything from party invitations to the Yule Ball…

…to the candy boxes inside the Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes joke shop.  The caption below the Marauder’s Map here states that the graphic artist that produced the map hand-wrote secret messages to the Graphic Department in it.

JK Rowling’s books and the movies are so closely aligned that I didn’t even notice that the rickety, covered bridge is never mentioned in the book.  It first appeared in the Prisoner of Azkaban and was eventually destroyed during the Battle of Hogwarts.

When you think of the different types of people involved in making a movie, you think of the actors, director, stunt-doubles, extras, makeup artists… but I’d never really given much thought to all of the architects and carpenters involved in building the elaborate sets. One section of the studio tour focused solely on all of the designs and models and carpenters that carefully constructed the various homes and buildings for HP.  And the sad thing is, most of these (like the Burrow pictured above) were destroyed by the final film.

In this same area, we saw a lot of various models of Hogwarts.  But as we walked into the final part of the studio, we came upon la crème de la crème –

Hogwarts! 

A giant model of the school is housed inside the WB studio.  The greenery around the castle is all real, and there are even lights inside and shadows of students walking the halls.  Close-ups of the castle were shot here, and the Battle of Hogwarts was strategically planned around the model. 

It was the perfect way to end the tour! If you are ever in London, this is one of my new favorite attractions that I highly recommend. Come and visit so I have an excuse to go back!