Katie Hunt walked through the entrance hall of the Harry Potter Studio Tour in London and stopped dead. A full-scale dragon loomed overhead, the hall was thick with carved pumpkins for the Dark Arts Halloween theme, and she had not even reached the Great Hall yet. For £58.50 a ticket in 2026, the question she had come to answer was a practical one: does this place still earn that price, or has the magic quietly left the building?
The tour bills itself as a three-to-four-hour experience, but Hunt arrived by shuttle bus just after 12:20 p.m. and did not leave until 5:40 p.m. That is closer to five and a half hours on the floor, and she noted she could not skip a single section even if she had wanted to.
Inside the sets, everything is the real thing
The Great Hall opened the tour properly, its stone tables lined with pumpkins in place of the floating candles that normally hang above them. A staff member there confirmed what Hunt kept circling back to throughout the day: every costume, every prop, every set piece was actually used during filming. The staff even explained how they tracked multiple versions of the same costume across different shoots, a logistical system Hunt admitted she had never considered before.
From the Great Hall she moved through the Gryffindor common room, the Potions classroom, Dumbledore’s office, and the Slytherin common room, pausing at a special Death Eater performance running only from September to November. The show was a live theatrical piece staged inside the tour route itself, something she described as genuinely startling. A sound-design demonstration later in the day broke down exactly how the Hungarian Horntail dragon’s roar was constructed by recording separate layers of real sound and slamming them together, a detail she said she had never known before visiting.
The outdoor backlot delivered Privet Drive, which Hunt pointed out is modeled on a real house visible on Google Maps, the flying car, the Hogwarts bridge with its deliberately uneven floor, and the mandrake pulling station, which she called ‘so satisfying to do.’ A spider section near the midpoint gave visitors the choice of going right to avoid them entirely. She went left anyway, and immediately regretted it.
The Hogwarts Express and the long queues
Platform 9 and 3/4 held the full Hogwarts Express, with each carriage arranged in chronological order of significant film scenes. The queue was long, but Hunt joined it specifically to show the interior, where the Prisoner of Azkaban carriage had been chilled to suggest the arrival of the Dementors. A Christmas shop appeared mid-route before Halloween had even arrived, which she found quietly absurd but admitted she would have bought everything in it.
At the halfway cafe, one butterbeer cost £7.99. Hunt skipped it because she dislikes fizzy drinks, but noted the cups are reusable and can be taken home, which softened the price a little. The tour closed on the Hogwarts castle model, a 1:24 scale construction that took six months to build, complete with tiny working lanterns inside the castle windows.
In the gift shop, she had promised herself one purchase. The Time-Turner necklace charmed her immediately. At £17 for the necklace alone versus £70 for the full charm version, the shop assistant put it plainly: ‘It’s a no-brainer then with the necklace.’ Hunt bought it on the spot, then spent the walk outside convincing herself it was a sensible decision.
A small jar behind the glass
In a side display near the creature effects section, three separate containers held the practical fluids used on set: the troll bogies Daniel Radcliffe wiped on his robes, the drool that was poured over Rupert Grint’s shoulder from the three-headed dog, and the unicorn blood from the first film, made from vegetable glycerin and laid over a mirror to give it a metallic sheen. The jars sat there quietly, labeled.
Hunt arrived at the Harry Potter Studio Tour for the third time in her life, having saved for months to bring her best friend on her 18th birthday the second time around. At £58.50 a ticket and five and a half hours later, she left with a Time-Turner around her neck and the same answer she came in hoping to find: the magic is still here.
Wake up to Only Happy News!
