Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Big Ben
and
Parliament,
along the Thames, welcome Harry to the modern city
inhabited by Muggles (nonmagic folk). London bustles along oblivious to the par-
allel universe of wizards. Hagrid takes Harry shopping for school supplies. They
enter the glass-roofed
Leadenhall Market
(Tube: Bank) and approach the
store-
front
at 42 Bull's Head Passage—the entrance to The Leaky Cauldron pub (which,
in the topics, is placed among the bookshops of Charing Cross Road). The pub's
back wall parts, opening onto the magical Diagon Alley, where Harry shops for
wands, cauldrons, and wizard textbooks. He pays for them with gold Galleons from
goblin-run Gringotts Wizarding Bank, filmed in the marble-floored and chande-
liered Exhibition Hall of
Australia House
(Tube: Temple), home of the Australian
Embassy.
Harry catches the train to Hogwarts at
King's Cross Station.
(The fanciful ex-
terior shot in
The Chamber of Secrets
(2002) is actually nearby
St. Pancras Inter-
national Station.
) Inside the glass-roofed train station, on a
pedestrian sky bridge
over the tracks, Hagrid gives Harry a train ticket. Harry heads to platform 9¾,
where he and his new buddy Ron magically push their luggage carts through a brick
pillar between the platforms, emerging onto a hidden platform. (For a fun photo-op,
head to the station's track 9 to find the
Platform 9
¾ sign, the luggage cart that looks
like it's disappearing into the wall, and a Harry Potter gift shop.)
A red steam train—the Hogwarts Express—speeds the boys through the (Scot-
tish) countryside to Hogwarts, where Harry will spend the next seven years. Harry
is taught how to wave his wand by tiny Professor Flitwick in a wood-paneled
classroom filmed at
Harrow School
in Harrow on the Hill, eight miles northwest
of London (Tube: Harrow on the Hill).
In
The Prisoner of Azkaban
(2004), Harry careens through London's lamp-lit
streets on a purple three-decker bus that dumps him at The Leaky Cauldron pub. In
this film, the pub's exterior was shot on rough-looking Stoney Street at the south-
east edge of
Borough Street Market,
by The Market Porter pub, with trains rum-
bling overhead (Tube: London Bridge).
In
The Order of the Phoenix
(2007), the Order takes to the night sky on broom-
sticks, zooming down the Thames and over London, passing over plenty of identi-
fiable landmarks, including the
Tower Bridge, London Eye, Big Ben,
and
Buck-
ingham Palace.
They arrive at Sirius Black's home at “Twelve Grimmauld Place,”
filmed at a park-like square called Lincoln's Inn Fields, near Sir John Soane's Mu-
seum (Tube: Holborn).
The
Millennium Bridge
is attacked by Death Eaters and collapses into the
Thames in the dramatic finale to
The Half
-
Blood Prince
(2009).
