Day trip to the making of Harry Potter studio tour

Last week on my week off, (which for once we didn’t have a holiday booked but had just planned to have a relaxing week at home and to just tidy and de-clutter our flat), however we had decided that on the Friday of last week we were going to take my partners niece, Sasha out for a day trip to the Warner Bros studios tour of the Making of Harry Potter. We had kept this as a surprise from her for a month, as you do need to book tickets in advance for this and kept giving her clues as to where we might be going – the best clue which we would thought would give it a way is – there are three main characters but the place we are going is named after just one of them.

The Warner Bros Studio is based on Leavesden which is not far from Watford, so on the Friday morning we all left Chichester and drove to the studios, as we arrived early we had a coffee in the coffee shop and we were able to go on an earlier tour. We were first taken into a room to watch a short introduction and then the tour began with the opening of the doors to the Grand hall. Now I have to confess I am not a big Harry Potter fan, yes i have watched all the films but didn’t really think the tour would be of any interest to me. However i was pleasantly surprised and actually learnt quite a lot from the day – we had paid extra for Sasha to have an interactive guide to listen to whilst walking round, and she was telling us key facts she had learnt. With the technology there you were made to look like you were sitting in the flying car as well as flying through London on the broomsticks.

So after walking through some of the sets inside and learning about the costumes, seeing some of the rooms such as the dormitory, the common room, Dumbledore’s office, the tour then continued outside where you then got to see some of the outside sets such as the bridge, houses on privet drive, and some of the chess pieces that were used in the film. Outside is an area where you can eat your picnics or buy hot dogs. This was also a chance to try butter beer – as you can see from the below picture don’t think my partner liked it much.

The tour then takes you into the final part where you learn about the special effects and make up, walk up diagon alley, then into the room for the artists and their sketches and seeing the cardboard pro types they had made. This then leads into the last room where the castle takes centre stage before conveniently ending up in the gift shop.

We were told that the tour could take anything from half an hour up to the longest time which was 13 hours (they must have been some die hard Harry Potter fans).  It took us about 4.5 hours and was certainly a day out enjoyed by all. My partner and his sister seemed to enjoy completing the children’s book and finding the golden snitches as we went round.

As for the rest of my week off – was this relaxing? no. Did I get to de-clutter and tidy our flat? No. Why? because on the Tuesday we discovered we had a mouse leaving in our flat, so spent the week playing catch the mouse but that’s another story and maybe a later blog.