We’re just returning home from our first family trip to London, and I think my favorite part of the entire experience was the Harry Potter Studio Tour!

We’ve been reading the Illustrated Harry Potter books with our boys as nighttime family read-alouds this past year. I’ve always wanted that experience, and much to my delight, I think my boys (and husband!) have enjoyed the wizarding world even more than I have!

When my husband found cheap direct flights to London, we knew our boys (ages 8 and 5) would love to see all the Harry Potter nods in London. In fact, we revealed the trip with a Harry Potter scavenger hunt and let them know Harry would be a big part of this trip. The biggest part, of course, was the Harry Potter Studio Tour.

What to Expect on Your Tour

Harry Potter fans will be delighted to to walk through 10 years of artifacts from all eight Harry Potter films. You’ll see artifacts, costumes, props, iconic sets with scene shot secrets, and a few fun surprises.
They have a fully-guided tour via handheld device that you can grab on your way in.

Personal Video Guide and Headphones

Don’t skip out on the guide, it is fantastic! It’s full of information, fun facts, movie clips, and narrations from the actors, director, producers, and J.K. Rowlings herself.

The guide is a mini tablet (phone sized) that does such a great job letting you interact with small video clips that explain each thing you’re going to see. You can choose to watch them all, or select those you’re most interested in. Let me tell you, I was happy to listen to them all! They are fascinating! And even our short attention span five-year-old enjoyed watching them and following along.

The Great Hall

The staff will usher you quickly into The Great Hall. This room is HUGE with so much attention to detail. Also, the setup just like you see in all the movies. I won’t spoil anything here for those who go, but the end of the walkthrough The Great Hall ends with a magical surprise. I mean cheering, clapping, sheer amazement kind of magic.

This is the one and only place they rushed us out of. They keep the entry queue moving and it’s the one experience they need to do in batches.

But you’ll exit seeing a few exam desks, and the transition to wardrobe begins with some of your favorite professors costumes on full display.

Wardrobe

Right after The Great Hall, you’ll walk through a wardrobe section. There’s an entire wall with all the wigs, hair pieces, and so much of the specialty wardrobe created for the movies.

My favorite was Luna Lovegood’s wardrobe, which had a tour guide to pull out specific dresses and pieces for a closer look. I loved seeing all of Dumbledore’s robes! But I particularly loved Hermione’s Yule Ball dress. It’s stunning in the movies, and even more stunning in real life!

Props

You can only imagine the great time, detail, and imagination each prop took to make! They had to get creative creating a wizarding world with unique props and the time and effort it took to create things that had never been made before.
The hall with props talks about so many specific details, and how each was made.

Indoor Sets

There are a few rooms you’ll see over and over in Harry Potter films, and those rooms are in the middle of the studio with open walls for filming. The Gryffindor common room, Harry’s dormitory, the Slytherin common room are large and happened to be the favorite hangouts of actors in between scenes! But my jaw dropped at Professor Dumbledore’s office! It may be the most stunningly detailed room that you’ll see. And I couldn’t get over the details like the young Minerva McGonagall portrait in the Gryffindor room. Or the telescope and intricacies of it in Dumbledore’s office. Oh yes, and the Sword of Gryffindor hangs proudly to admire from a distance.

The guide also taught us that the stacks of books were hundreds of phonebooks decorated to look like ancient wizard books.

My personal favorite is the potions classroom. I could have spent hours staring at each of the potion jars. It was one person’s job to create each of the items in the jars, and they got creative picking up plastic animals and redecorating, visiting butchers, and inventing a large scale room with no detail spared! It was in fact such a popular space, they expanded it after the first film.

Truly, the details in each space are delightful, and we could have spent so much more time there staring at each!

Green Screen Experience

Let me warn you, if you go to this area, you will likely shell out money for the pictures and videos they’ll take! From the wanted wizard pictures to the green screen flying on a broom through famous scenes from the movie, they are so fun! We decided to tell them to take all our money here! I mean we know our boys will watch the movies of themselves and their parents flying on brooms for years to come!

Special Effects

The filmmakers had such a challenge to create so many magical scenes! The special effects area is where you learn all about their filmmaking trickery.
You would think they would use mostly green screens in the movies, and there are plenty of those. However, I loved learning and seeing that they decided to mechanically build so many of the scenes that created special effects. They knew they could get real reactions from the actors with actual “magic” and if the budget warranted it, they always opted to build it.

We learned the cake over Aunt Petunia was lifted with tiny water streams- and got to see it happen live! They build machines to shoot letters everywhere. It was amazing to see so many mechanical items and real props designed to interact with greenscreens.

And honestly, the quidditch area blew my mind! I remember going to an opening night midnight showing of the first movie mostly hoping to see how they portrayed quidditch. It was fun to learn they made so many tech improvements quidditch looks almost completely different by the third movie. I was just geeking out over all the details and effects that made Quidditch happen on the screen!

The Dark Arts/Ministry of Magic

You round the corner to see THE TABLE full of the Death Eaters, or at least mannequins in their costumes set at the table. Right down to Professor Charity Burbage hanging from the ceiling reading to be consumed by a snake. It was a bit of a shock for our kids who haven’t seen that scene yet, but I guess now I won’t be too worried when we watch the movie since they saw the complete behind-the-scenes.

I watched the movie in the tour guide with a behind-the-scenes of the making of the scene blended with the real scene about three times. It is incredible to see how they planted actors, cameras, and CGI to make it happen.

Right around the corner is the Ministry of Magic with walls, offices, and even Dolores Umbridge’s table complete with cat plates and her pink costume.

And off to the side, you can take an interactive lesson from the choreographer who taught actions how to fight with wands. He is a martial arts expert who invented what fighting with a wand woud look like. Actors took three-hour classes to learn moves and physically practice with their wands. I loved watching my boys practice and perform some moves!

The Forbidden Forrest

There are enough magical scenes in the Forbidden Forest, they went right ahead and built it! This was another one they originally did for the actor’s reactions. Apparently, Rupert Grint (Ron) has true arachnophobia and knew what he was getting into with the second movie. They built Argon the spider to scale, with tons of other giant robotic spiders descending. And you can experience the whole scene yourself!

We saw Buckbeak the animatronic. And also Harry’s famous Patronus scene from The Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s a very surreal thing to walk through all these scenes!

Hogwarts Express

Warner Brothers bought an old train and had it transported to the studios. Which as you can imagine, was no small feat!

They transformed it to the Hogwarts Express, and I learned they had to give it a fresh coat of red paint before each movie.

Before you tour the train, there are a few fun things to do and great photo ops! Stop to take photos with a few luggage trolley options at Platform 9 ¾.
Take a minute to make an origami howler and hear Mrs. Weasley send one to Ron. And pause for a photo with a letter inviting you to Hogwarts in front of the giant train.

You can tour the outside of the Hogwarts Express, and walk through a train car from each movie. I loved the frozen Dementor car from the third movie! But they were all fantastic!

At this point, you’re a little over halfway through the tour, and it’s a perfect time to stop for some food at…

Backlot Cafe

You’ll find mostly American fare here. There are mostly burgers, hot dogs, salads, and loaded French fries. We weren’t expecting much, but we all liked our food

Don’t skip out on the butterbeer sampler! You can try a butterbeer drink, butterbeer ice cream, and a butterbeer cupcake on a flight. We enjoyed them all! Our boys loved the butterbeer best, and Jacob and I both liked the ice cream best.

Outside Sets

The outside sets section is delightful- and where I started to wish we’d had more time! You’ll start with Privot Drive from the outside, and walk through the inside of the Dursley’s house. You can see the scene with Aunt Marge, including the inflated character props.

Next up is the perfect photo op stops with the famous vehicles from the movies. The Knight Bus is ready for pictures, as is Hagrid’s motorcycle and the Weasley’s card Ron and Harry drive to Hogwarts in book 2.

Creating Magical Creatures

We hurried through this part, and I’d go back just to have time to listen to all the commentary from the audio tour! We saw the masks and makeup that made up the goblins and trolls.

There are giant snake heads, dragons, and all the fantastical creatures in one place!

Gringotts Bank

I was floored how giant Gringotts Bank is! I mean I know a lot was going on there with scenes of goblins working, but I never thought it was one continuous space!

You can look through vaults, see the famous desks, and then head to the next room for a literal bang. The Dragon escapes through Gringotts right before your eyes with all the Hollywood-style effects. It’s an incredible scene, and I can’t believe it’s all live with very minimal CGI!

Diagon Alley

Diagon Alley is a very real and continuous street with each of the specialty shops in a row. If we’d had another hour I would have loved to have spent it looking at the details in the shops.

But the ones I spent time looking in had me tickled with the clever details and elements inside! And the Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes shop tugged right at my heartstrings. You can see the magical pranks and homage to the beloved family in all the spectacular detail. I love that it’s there!

Hogwarts Castle

Obviously, it wouldn’t be in a movie budget to build a full Hogwarts exterior, but they definitely built a model that’s still huge to film all the panning shots of the castle. And you can walk around the castle and see some of the effects they used like winter shows, fireworks, and day and night time lighting. It’s amazing! And I can only imagine the CGI artist’s creativity turning the model into something magical and perfect for the scene!