YA Meets Travel

Expedia offers so many add-ons it’s easy for your brain to get muddled. I had just carefully selected my flights and hotels for my trip to London when the site threw dozens of offers at me. Bus tours, museum passes, day trips to Stonehenge, all deeply discounted. When I saw the option for “Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studio Tour,” I checked the box, because I grew up in the late nineties and caught the reading bug from J. K. Rowling’s incredible books. In my mid-twenties, I’m still in love with them.

I wasn’t expecting much from the tour, but my curiosity was piqued when my mother and I climbed the shuttle bus—a double-decker plastered with images of Hogwarts. It wound out into suburbia, to the Warner Bros. studio in Leavesden.

Somehow, in booking the tour tickets, I hadn’t realized what I was in for. Walking into the colossal warehouse-like structure, past concrete hand imprints from Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, lovingly made on the studio tour’s opening day, it became clear: this wasn’t a museum. This was Hogwarts.

Waiting in line to enter, one passes a staircase on display as if chopped out of a house, walls and all. I peered inside, and there was Harry’s bed, rumpled sheets and all, under a single lightbulb. The cupboard under the stairs, as real as if Harry had just rolled out of bed, and as full of sadness as ten-year-old Harry himself.

I was primed for a seriously emotional afternoon.

The tour begins in the Great Hall.

It’s all there. Stone pillars, huge fireplaces, candles hovering (on wires). The only missing piece is the ceiling, which in the movies reveals the weather outside—in real life, it’s an industrial display of rafters and lighting. Mannequins of major characters stand at the front of the hall in iconic costumes like Hagrid’s coat and Snape’s robes. Three mannequins wear three different sizes of Harry’s Hogwarts robes, from first film through eighth.

The tour is packed with props and displays of how special effects were created—few with CGI—the phrase “so that’s how they did that” is repeated constantly. Visitors can taste Butterbeer (delicious) and walk Diagon Alley. Perhaps the most touching thing are the words of Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint, repeated through the exhibits: for so many years, this studio wasn’t just a workplace: it was their home. We watched them grow up on screen, but they grew up at Leavesden Studio, on set.

And, of course, it all culminates in the most magical gift shop on earth.