The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Boomers were rock stars, we were wizards’
Twenty years after the first Harry Potter film, the locations will still enchant every generation, says Greg Dickinson
On a recent autumn morning I walked through a chilled King’s Cross station, draped in a cloak of my own condensed breath. It was early. So early that the queues had not yet formed around a certain luggage trolley, half-submerged in a certain wall. I have travelled from London to England’s North East many times before, but there was something different about this trip. The people boarding the train at platform six were travelling to York, Newcastle and beyond. My destination was Hogwarts.
One perk of being part of Generation Y is that we grew up as peers of Harry Potter. Boomers may have been rock stars, but we were wizards. I certainly felt this to be true. When JK Rowling’s first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, came out in 1997 I was just seven years old. But by the time the final instalment hit the shelves I had caught up and was 17, just like Harry, only with less destiny.
This month marks 20 years since Warner Bros studios took on the mammoth task of turning the written Harry Potter universe into a film franchise. The real-world settings like King’s Cross station and the Reptile House at London Zoo cast themselves. But the fictional settings of Diagon Alley, Hogwarts and Hogsmeade were moulded from a combination of studio sets and existing places. With the flick of a wand, historic sites across the land became part of the wizarding world.
Four hours after departing King’s Cross my LNER train rolled into Alnmouth Station, where I spotted a piece of A4 paper blue-tacked to a window. I dialled the top number and a man with a thick Geordie accent croaked “Alnwick Wizard Taxis” down the line: the real-life version of the rowing boats which usher students across the Black Lake to Hogwarts, I suppose.
It is plain to see why the location scouts picked Alnwick Castle for the exterior Hogwarts scenes. Its crenellated walls and well-groomed greens are the perfect settings upon which to transpose Rowling’s imaginary world. The fact it was (and remains) lived in, by the 12th Duke of Northumberland no less, gave it added plausibility as a functioning school. Almost everywhere you turn is recognisable from the film. The Outer Bailey is where Harry and friends had their first lesson under the instruction of Zoe Wanamaker’s Madam Hooch, and these days the castle runs very popular “broom flying” classes on the lawn. Then there’s the Inner Bailey, where Harry and Ron crash their flying car in the second film, and outside the castle walls you’ll find the spot where the students wander down to Hagrid’s Hut.
The surrounding hills, the Whomping Willow and the Forbidden Forest, however, were the workings of CGI. Not that the children here seem to care. There was something refreshing, if jarring, about seeing young ones dragging their parents and grandparents around an old heritage site, and not the other way around. Does it matter that they (and let’s face it, many older visitors) are drawn to Alnwick because of Harry Potter, instead of Harry Hotspur, who was born here in 1364 and fought against the French in the Hundred Years War? I suspect some will sniff at the idea. But Tintagel Castle lures in punters as the birthplace of the mythical King Arthur, not for its associations with (checks notes) Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall. Loch Ness is world-famous not for its scale and beauty, but for its resident monster. As Alnwick has discovered, a sprinkling of make believe can get unlikely visitors through the door – millions since 2001. And they continue to arrive from far and wide.
Stefy de Bellis was exploring the castle grounds in full homemade Gryffindor garb, like a Mediterranean Hermione. “There’s magic in the air in England,” she said, so thrilled to be at Alnwick for the first time that she would be returning again the following day. She said that Harry Potter helped her through a difficult time during childhood, and that she has never looked back. Stefy is now the owner of two pet owls, and works as an actress in a wizarding world attraction called Lilium Alley in her hometown of Naples. “And the books showed me there’s magic in all of us,” she said, before wafting off as if she was late for class.
If she was, she would have to travel beyond the grounds of Alnwick. Rumour has it that the production crew originally wanted to shoot the classroom and corridor scenes at Canterbury Cathedral, but were turned away for the story’s “pagan themes”. Gallantly, Durham Cathedral stepped up to the mark, which is convenient for touring Potter fans as the city is just two stops (40 minutes) south of Alnmouth by rail.
“The most famous scene is probably when Harry releases Hedwig in the snow,” Clarissa Cahill, marketing officer of Durham Cathedral, told me as we took a lap of the cloisters stomped by Radcliffe, Watson and Grint in the films. Production crew used carpet snow for this particular scene, after staff at Alnwick Castle complained of finding fake snow flakes lodged into cracks in the walls, months after the crew shot a wintry scene there. “Or,” she smiled, “the scene where Ron pukes up slugs in the second film. That was filmed here, too.”
Being a place of worship, and a popular visitor destination in its own right, the cathedral doesn’t try too hard to cash in on its Potter links, beyond hosting the odd tea party in the Chapter House where Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagall held transfiguration classes. That said, I did see a university student in a long black robe walking oddly meaningfully through the cloisters, only to spot his accomplice crouching down to take a photograph from behind. A relatively new tradition, Clarissa told me, among students who arrived after 2001.
While Durham and Alnwick are the set piece filming locations, arguably some of the most memorable shots from the first film are the aerial views of the Hogwarts Express, huffing and puffing ambiguously north through epic British terrain. The best-known location is the curving Glenfinnan Viaduct in the Scottish Highlands, which you can experience on the Jacobite Steam Train
With the flick of a wand, sites across the land became part of the wizarding world
(westcoastrailways.co.uk), but there is a stretch of railway deep in the North York Moors that also played a pivotal role in the early films.
“We’re going to Hogsmeade! We’re going to Hogsmeade!” A young girl hopped up and down on the platform at Grosmont, as a scarlet locomotive chugged into view in a cloud of its own white steam. Similarly excited folk, half a century or so older, crouched at knee height with expensive looking cameras at the ready. The Whitby and Pickering Railway was surveyed by George Stephenson and opened in 1836 as a singletrack horse-drawn operation, with the purpose of halting the decline of Whitby by introducing better links with the rest of the country. The line closed in 1965 before being brought back to life by a group of volunteers in 1973. And it’s a good job they did; these days the
North Yorkshire Moors Railway is the most popular heritage railway line in the land.
Aboard the steam train I felt like I was in the belly of a beast, burping its way out of Grosmont before rumbling through North Yorkshire’s valleys. The atmosphere in the wood-panelled carriage was one of jovial, transgenerational glee; surely no other activity has the power to unite grandparents with grand
children in this way? It was the grandfather, not the young child, who gasped with excitement when the train went round a bend and he could see the front carriage snaking in the near distance.
Some 15 minutes later we rolled into the toyshop station of Goathland, complete with the obligatory quaint tea room and red bridge joining up the two platforms. Goathland is the filming location of Hogsmeade Station, where Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid ushers students on and off the Hogwarts Express in the first film, although it was also the filming