Utter Hogwarts!

Rowling debunks myths that surround boy wizard

IT was the ultimate rags to riches story – holed up in a coffee shop taking advantage of their free heating, single mother JK Rowling created one of the most famous children’s stories of all time.

Yet the theory around the ‘birthplace’ of Harry Potter, rumoured to have been Edinburgh’s Elephant House Café, now seems little more than hocus pocus.

For JK Rowling has revealed she actually dreamed up her tales about the boy wizard on a delayed train from Manchester to London.

The author bust a number of myths about her sources of inspiration in posts on social media.

It comes as over the years, a number of shops, cafés and pubs have claimed to have played host to Ms Rowling as she wrote her spellbinding tales.

Many believe the Shambles, a street in York dating back to the 14th century, was the inspiration for Diagon Alley, where Harry and his friends pick up supplies for their classes at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Students at Exeter University, where Ms Rowling, 54, studied, have long believed her books’ Leaky Cauldron was based on the local Old Firehouse pub.

By far the most persistent yarn is that the author – who was last week revealed to be the 34th richest woman in UK, with a net worth of £795 million – came up with the idea of her stories in the Elephant House Café in Edinburgh.

It is widely regarded as the place where the author penned at least the first of the seven of her hit fantasy novels, before the first was published by Bloomsbury Children’s Books in 1997.

But after a fan posted a photograph of the café on social media and wrote, ‘Tell me the truth about this “birthplace” of Harry Potter’, Ms Rowling replied that this was not where Harry was conceived.

The author added that she had ‘been writing Potter for several years before I ever set foot in this café, so it’s not the birthplace’.

Luckily for the Elephant, which is popular with Potter fans, Ms Rowling did confirm that later books were indeed written there.

The writer said she actually thought up the idea for Harry Potter in 1990, when she was on a delayed train. She wrote: ‘If you define the birthplace of Harry Potter as the moment when I had the initial idea, then it was a Manchester to London train.

‘But I’m perennially amused by the idea that Hogwarts was directly inspired by beautiful places I saw or visited, because it’s so far from the truth.’

She also shared a picture of a flat in South-West London and wrote: ‘This is the true birthplace of Harry Potter, if you define “birthplace” as the spot where I put pen to paper for the first time.’ She added: ‘I was renting a room in a flat over what was then a sports shop. The first bricks of Hogwarts were laid in a flat in Clapham Junction.’

The revelations concerned some fans, with one tweeting: ‘There are businesses in York who will fight anyone (probably including you) who doubts that Diagon Alley is the Shambles.

‘I would not recommend coming between a Yorkshire shopkeeper and their marketing.’ Dispelling the myths around her inspiration, Ms Rowling replied: ‘Looks like I’ve got a fight on my hands, because I’ve never seen or been to the Shambles.’

In another tweet, Ms Rowling said that her ‘favourite bit of nonsense’ was fans pinpointing a parking meter in Edinburgh that she is rumoured to have used while writing the Deathly Hallows – despite the fact the author says she cannot drive.

‘Parking meter tale is my favourite bit of nonsense’