King`s Cross Station

Welcome, Harry Potter fans!

Right... I want to make one thing clear, and that´s the fact that my motive number one, two and three for visiting King´s Cross station in London was always to see the location of the much-watched Harry Potter film scenes, but even more than this, to see the station where J. K. Rowling herself sat on a train and thought of the idea for a book series which would enchant millions of children and adults alike.

St Pancras train station, beside King´s Cross

In terms of my Harry Potter obsession, everything had started with the insistent need to visit this place. My friend and travelling companion Yuliana perfectly understood that I wanted to go and fulfill my childhood dream, but I´m sure she later on wondered why of all the exciting places to visit in London I chose to go to a train station. In the end though, for me it was definitely worth it.

We took the tube to get there and it was easy to find the station, however when we arrived I realised that there are actually two stations right next to each other. One of them looked exactly like the one in the films, and the other not so much. My confusion only grew when I realised that the station with the rather unimpressive design was in fact King´s Cross, and not the one I´d always seen on the screen.

So it was all an illusion?

It turned out that I´d been living a lie for all those years, and I´ll take this opportunity to explain what happened: the real King´s Cross station is right next to St Pancras station! However, St Pancras is a lot more visually appealing from the outside than King´s Cross, so I presume that the very clever and wicked producers of Harry Potter took advantage of this.

Mystery solved!

When I´d solved this mystery, I was very disappointed as I had to come back down to Earth and remind myself that Harry Potter was, after all, all the product of a very creative woman´s mind, although I guess it was always unlikely that an owl was going to bring me my Hogwarts letter on my eleventh birthday...

In the end, we entered the station and discovered that it´s actually quite pretty on the inside. Of course, all Harry Potter fans are welcome to visit Platform 9 3/4, and there is a pretty good device which takes photos of you and animates them. It was a dream come true and we had a lot of fun doing it!

Just beside the Platform 9 3/4 luggage trolley is a shop selling all kinds of souvenirs to satisfy the Pottermaniac that lives inside me. Uniforms, magic wands, books, snitches, flying broomsticks... All in all, a magical place to visit. :)