Warner Brothers Studio Tour

Thursday morning we got up early, checked out of the London hotel and left our bags with the bellman. Guess where we were headed?

The Warner Brothers Studio Tour outside of London! This site was VERY high on Amelia and John's interest list, and was probably one of the most significant reasons we chose London as one of our destinations for this trip. This tour is so popular - I booked the reservation in April, and even that far in advance several of the time slots were sold out during our time in the U.K. 

The Warner Brothers (WB) studio, the infamous location where the Harry Potter movies were filmed, is located in an outlying suburb of London. To get there we took a slow above ground subway train from a central London train station (and we learned our lesson about finding a more direct train for the return trip!) to the Watford Junction stop. From the train station we boarded a double-decker tour bus for the short ride through the town to the WB studio.

If you are a Harry Potter movie fan you likely recognize these larger-than-life chess pieces from the movies! John looks so small in comparison.

The WB studio tour was a very organized affair. The one-way path through the exhibits was carefully designed and there were detailed signs placed all around so that you could understand what you were looking at. The entrance tickets were limited on timed intervals, so once you were inside it wasn't crowded enough to be unpleasant.

The first significant site on the tour was the Great Hall that was used to film so many scenes at Hogwarts. It was really fun to stand in the Great Hall while on site though my pictures didn't capture the height and grand scale of the room. Below is a photo of some of the costumes worn by the HP characters, as organized by house (these are Gryffindor).

This exhibit explained how the studio used green screens to film the broom flying/quiddich scenes.

We got to see so many of the Hogwarts rooms from the movies.

The Hogwarts express! This is the train used in filming, and we were able to board the cars to understand the relation between what was used in filming the movie versus what you see on screen in the films.

The 9 3/4 platform scenes were actually filmed in London (King's Cross train station, I think), but this is a replica that was perfect for a photo opportunity.

The Night Bus! The bus had beds inside and was just as depicted in the movie!

One of the most memorable scenes from the early movies is when the letters from Hogwarts arrive in abundance at Harry's house.

Below is the model of Hogwarts that was used, with a green-screen, to film some of the exterior shots. This is a large-scale replica that we walked around from platforms above. The detail is amazing!

What an amazing day! John declared it his favorite activity from the entire trip!

Once back in London, we travelled by tube back to our hotel, collected our bags, and embarked on a more complicated than planned journey out to Gatwick airport. We had an early flight the next morning from London to Italy so we had plans to spend the night in an airport hotel. Little did we know when we started off in the early evening from London that there were horrendous rains/floods that day on the train path from London city to the Gatwick area that considerably slowed our journey. However, we finally arrived and enjoyed a casual dinner in our airport hotel before retiring early in preparation for the trip to Italy. 

This was also the day of the Brexit vote. What an exciting time for our family to be in the U.K! We saw so many people on the tube wearing "I voted in!" stickers on this day, so we were greatly surprised by the outcome the next morning!