4 days ago
Harry Potter tourism is ruining our cities… and it's about to get worse
When I was at primary school, a key signifier of social status was whether you had queued from midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter book on release day (I was never allowed — respect, Mum). With the final instalment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, having been published in July 2007, the rather less edifying modern-day equivalent, I'd suggest, is convincing your parents to take you to one of the garish unofficial Harry Potter shops, found in increasing numbers in UK cities from London to Edinburgh via Oxford.
Three stores have opened between Leicester Square and Charing Cross stations in central London over the past few years — House of Spells, Magical Platform and Wizards & Wonders — and each is as tacky and depressing as the next. Stuffed elves and owls, Hogwarts Express bookends, handbags boasting 'Proud Ravenclaw', stacks of wands … nothing on the shelves is tasteful, let alone useful, and all of it is overpriced (one wand for £55 or two for £100). If Hieronymus Bosch were alive I reckon he would have ripped up his hellscapes and painted House of Spells instead — this grotesque postcard from the consumeristic abyss of Britain would hang pride of place at the Prado in Madrid.
Much like those ubiquitous American candy stores, wizardry-related shops have now opened in prime spots in other cities popular with tourists — including Bath, Cambridge and Salisbury, none of which bear any connection to the book or film franchise.
And it's a similar story for Harry Potter tours. In York, where a single scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was filmed at the train station, tour groups overrun the Shambles, the city's most famed street, rumoured to be an influence for Diagon Alley in the book (JK Rowling has denied this but the visitors keep coming). In Edinburgh, where the most notable Harry Potter sight is a café that Rowling used to frequent, there are no fewer than 36 Potter-adjacent tours listed on the activity booking platform Get Your Guide — ask a local about overtourism and they're more than likely to describe the city centre as a 'Harry Potter theme park'.
All of which raises the question: 14 years after the last film was released, have we finally reached Peak Potter? No, I'd wager — filming for the ten-year HBO TV series is under way and Potter tourism is surely only going to get bigger. So I've come up with a three-point plan to get us out of this cursed mess.
• 29 of the best hotels in Edinburgh
First, embrace and expand the good. The Warner Bros studio tour is a fun day out, even for non-fans. The site in Leavesden, Hertfordshire, has proved to be a huge hit for a reason: you get fascinating insight into how the Harry Potter films were made and can browse countless original props. Why not create a satellite experience with new exhibits in Edinburgh? The demand would be there, and if a suburban location were chosen it would have the added advantage of drawing Potterheads out of the city.
My second suggestion is for those small, quintessentially British cities that attract Potter fans to make more of films and TV shows that were actually shot there — Edinburgh has Trainspotting, Bath has period dramas galore and Cambridge has The Theory of Everything (if you want to see the spot where half a dozen extras raided the biscuit store after ten hours of sitting around doing nothing, let me know — I was one of them). To visitors I'd suggest that part of the fun could be to take yourself on a location-spotting jaunt, rather than join a same-old walking tour that irritates locals.
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And third, could councils act accordingly to stop yet more souvenir shops — especially naff wizardry-themed ones — blighting our cities? Amsterdam has banned tourist stores from opening in parts of its centre, and I don't see why a policy like that wouldn't work here.
Failing that, I might invest in one of those wands — 'Expelliarmus', wasn't it?
Do you agree? Share your thoughts in the comments
