Harry Potter tour
Our Great British Adventure
April 19, 2018We said farewell to Lyme Regis and headed back the way we'd came, almost all the way to Heathrow. We had tickets for a Harry Potter exhibition at a Warner Bros site outside London. We arrived quite early, cleared security (metal detectors and bag checks!) and headed to the cafe for lunch. The place was absolutely packed. School groups from any number of countries were going through.
They packed up many of the sets used in the movies and put them all into these huge buildings. The Great Hall was there in full, as was Diagon Alley, and a station with the Hogwarts Express. There were also sections for all the different types of effects used, which were probably the most fascinating to me. The Forbidden Forest was funny as the suddenly moving animatronic giant spider invariably caused someone to jump and shriek.
We'd thought we'd finished and were happy with what we'd seen when we reached the end of the building, only to find a second building. It's highlight was a huge, detailed scale model of Hogwarts which had been used for the aerial sequences. When I say huge, it was 2 stories high: we came into the room at the top level and wound our way down to the bottom on a sloped ramp that circled it. The sheer craftsmanship was extraordinary.
Anthony admitted you wouldn't have got him out of the place if he were 10, but we're older and still jetlagged so we headed off after a couple of hours for our next destination - Oxford.