London Harry Potter Tour

Another mystery post that I am not quite sure what happened to....As I am getting ready to move its a bit like cleaning out the closet and finding all the lost Christmas presents and 1 random glove.  Anyway, before the last Harry Potter movie we went on a tour around London to see all the places that they had used in the first movies, before they had everything built on the movie lot.  If you are Harry Potter buff you will probably recognize them all, and if you aren't you probably wont have a clue.

Cecil Court, just off of Charing Cross Road, is the real Diagon Alley.

 This is along Scotland Place, and used as the visitors entrance to the Ministry of Magic

Underneath this bridge was the Leaky Cauldron.  Exterior shots were done here just around the corner from Borough Market.

The blue door of this opticians was imposed into the previous location as the door of the Leaky Cauldron.

Just around the corner from the blue door is Leadenhall market.  Its been around for over 100 years!  The market has been used for the exterior shots of Diagon Alley in the movies.

And the last stop and probably the easiest recognised is at King's Cross rail station. It has appeared in every Harry Potter film as it is the starting point on the journey to Hogwarts via the Hogwarts Express which departs from Platform 9 3/4.  

They did however need to renumber the actual platforms 4 and 5, as platforms 9 and 10 are not next to each other.  I guess the station isn't unhappy with the extra publicity as they graciously installed a platform 9 3/4 for people to take pictures at.  There was a 5 minute line just to get a picture taken.  

Obviously there is alot of computer work done behind the scene, but was still fun to see, and found some nice places that we would have never known of otherwise.

Harry Potter...again

In the final episode of what has been a pretty extensive Harry Potter experience here in London we went to the WB studio tour just outside of town.  

We had already gone on a tour of sites in London where filming had taken place (somehow the pictures disappeared, must have been magic), experienced the madness first hand with the Premieres here last year, and visited some of the other locations which inspired the movie.  Turns out that for the first film they did alot of the shooting on locations, as it wasn't clear yet just how popular the films were going to be and they didn't want to spend the money to build everything the first time around.  But this ended up being the home for the cast and crew for something like 10 years.

I am sure that I will get ridiculed for saying this, but may have been my favorite thing in all of Europe.  It has been a year and a half of seeing sights and thinking 'wow I wonder what happened here' but this time you knew exactly what happened there.  There is a quote from a movie that says something like, 'do you know why people look sad when they walk out of a movie theatre?  Its because all the magic is gone and they have to go back to reality.' (if anyone knows the movie let me know, because I have been racking my brain for like a week trying to figure it out.)  The entire place was like that for me....a journey out of reality and into a world where literally anything was possible.  I could have spent days just staring at stuff.  

I give all of the creative people and artists tons of credit, to see what they put together up close was just amazing.  Thinking about the movies, you would have guessed that they were like 90% CGI, but seeing how much stuff was actually real just made it even more impressive.  

I ended up taking like 500 pictures, so pretty much have the entire tour documented, but tried to scale it way down to share.  Even still it won't do it justice.  Here is a link to alot of the pics, but still nowhere near all of them.  Some of the most impressive stuff and a quick 2 minute tour is here.......

The cupboard under the stairs

The tour begins with the front doors of Hogwarts

And then the REAL full size great hall

From the Yule Ball

The boys dorm and Harry's bed

The gates to Hogwarts

From the Ministry

No. 4 Privet Drive, on the studio backlot

Diagone Alley

Strangely enough this was the part of the tour that I was most in awe of.  Not sure why.....something about people coming up with these crazy ideas and designs and then, making them absolutely flawless down to the last detail.   Would have loved to have one of these up on my wall.  

The other thing that was stuck out was at the very end of the tour they had a 1/24th scale model of the entirety of Hogwarts.  Supposedly took 8 people 40 days to build.  Was complete down to lights in windows that turned on when the 'sun' went down and movement to make it look like students were walking through the halls.  They used the model for the first 7 movies until the CGI got to a point where they had a good enough digital Hogwarts.  

Oxford

Went on a tour company trip to Oxford back when we had company visiting. It was mixed with Windsor and Stonehenge, but since we have covered those before we won't get into it again. Wasn't super interesting from a things to see standpoint. Lots of old buildings but nothing that really stood out. Highlight was the dining hall at Christ Church College. It is the inspiration for the dinning hall at Hogwarts, from Harry Potter, minus the magic flying plates, and ghosts and such.

Christ Church College

See the resemblance??

 

Other cool thing was that the dinning hall inspired the book Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll's (The author of the book) father was the headmaster at Christchurch, and wore a robe everyday with white rabbit fur around the collar. Would watch him go through a small door at the end of the dinning hall into his private office, which Lewis wasn't allowed. Thus the rabbit hole was born!!

Characters from the book are built into the stained glass of the hall.



 The trip was pretty cool from an educational standpoint though. Found out a lot about the British education system and lost a lot of respect for an oxford education. Explains a lot about Clinton! No I take that back, we could only be so lucky to see him back in office. I digress...so Oxford isn't one university, but made up of 38 separate ones. Each only teaching one specific subject, and only having something like 100 students. So when you decide you want to go to "Oxford" you have to be super selective about what you want to do. The rumour is that a lot of people just want to say they have an Oxford degree so they just apply at the school with the most graduating students the year before. Now I know what you are saying....that sounds crazy to pick your major that way, but don't worry it doesn't matter because apparently nobody gets a degree in the field they want to work in, its just expected that if you need specific knowledge to do your job your employer will either teach you or send you to school to learn it. That is why the accountants I work with are an engineer, a political science, and a psychology major. Anyway, so you are now in a college at Oxford, whatever you do don't change your degree. You would have to reapply to another school, and since you only studied one subject everything you learned is useless. And did I mention there is no class? Yeah, you read a book and meet privately once a week with your professor.









Now I am sure that my account is full of inaccuracies, but that is the story I got!! So I will let you make your own inferences and judgements, but thought it was very interesting none the less.