Hogwarts

Well, today I went on an adventure to Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour.

It was amazing. Buzz feed gave a fantastic description of how you feel as an adult on the tour:

'You go into a cinema and are shown an introductory film about the tour. Then the screen rises up and holy HELL, there’s a huge door behind it. This woman asks everyone if they’re excited, and you shout “YEAH!” louder than all the children who are there put together. Then the door slowly opens and…It’s the Great Hall! You smash toddlers and parents with prams aside as you charge into the room.

Thought the whole thing was CGI magic? No, they built this place from scratch. It looks pretty much as it did in the films — even the candles are floating above the tables (although you can see the wires).

In fact, for the first half hour or so, you’re just in awe. You’re reminded that for just over a decade, Britain built a magical world of winter balls and curvy secret passages…

You get completely sucked into Harry's magical world and when you look at your pictures afterwards, you’ll realise exactly how long you spent walking around grinning like a tool. There are people being taught a sneaky wand attack preferred by Death Eaters, and that isn’t sad. That’s AMAZING. You stagger in a daze from one exhibit to another, a gormless expression of joy on your face.

You’re blown away by the ambition and amount of work that went into everything. Look at Dumbledore’s office. Just LOOK AT IT. Those bookshelves are phone directories that have been rebound and covered in dust. Yes. Diagon Alley is an alley. There are 20,000 different packages and goods in this street. The buildings have been bent and twisted with ropes and winches.

They really built a world here. And building a world takes incredible skill. The concept art and the detailed models alone took many, many hours. They’re quite stunning. And a huge number of actual documents were made for the movies — there were thousands of letters for a start, but they had to be rewritten after they were found to be too heavy for the owls. In total, 588 sets were built for the eight movies.

You realise that however lost in this world you might be, there are people far more lost than you.

And then you remember that Harry Potter was quite bleak sometimes. It was, at its heart, a story about the desperate need to escape the miserable claustrophobia of middle-class British suburbia. And it was also about the disfunctionality, disconnect, and lack of love in some foster families. You ask yourself, was Harry Potter ever really a story about magic at ALL? For example, who was really scarier: Voldemort or Dolores Umbridge, a woman whose main trait was the strength of her conviction in her own righteousness, a person we’ve met, by degrees, over and over in our lives? You start to feel a bit down.

And then you wonder if you should have come here. Because it’s destroying the magic. Quidditch: an elaborate and highly technical deception. It didn’t happen. None of it was real. Nearly Headless Nick wasn’t really a ghost. In fact, half the time you weren’t even watching real people. You remember you’re not in a magical world at all. You’re standing in a big warehouse near Watford.

And then something rather beautiful happens.

You come across this massive scale model of Hogwarts, which took seven months and 40 people to build. The lighting changes from day to night, and it looks even more magical. And you’re just blown away by this thing. It’s gigantic. But what really hits you is the amount of love that must’ve gone into making it. And suddenly you realise — yes, Potter is an industry. It always was. And yes, you’re old and cynical and now you can’t help but notice that fact. But does it really matter? Because if it’s an industry, it’s still one that makes thousands of people happy. There are hundreds of kids running around this place right now, with huge grins on their faces. And that has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?'

No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever. So whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.
-JK Rowling