Getting Our Harry Potter Fix Wherever We Can

Day 5: Hitting a Wall in Oxford

My niece and I are big Harry Potter fans, so when we started planning this trip, one of the first things we considered doing was visiting Warner Brothers Studio for the Harry Potter experience. As the schedule started to fill up, we decided we didn’t want to burn most of a day doing this, so we looked for ways to incorporate some filming locations into our other sightseeing. Enter Oxford. We booked a tour of the reading rooms at Bodleian Library, which included a look around Duke Humphry’s Library, which served as Hogwarts’s library in some of the films.

We successfully took our first tube journey to Paddington Station and caught a train to Oxford. Our plan had been to do a self-guided walking tour until it was time for our Bodleian tour. But, we were all dragging a bit, and my mom said that she might find a place to sit while my niece and I walked around. Sitting sounded kind of good to all of us. So…to the HOHO bus. Yeah, still not my favorite thing in the world, but in this instance, it saved the day. I suppose the lesson is that you need to be willing to change things up to fit the circumstances. For us, taking a loop on the HOHO bus (and half of a second loop when we mostly dozed) gave us the rest we needed to go on.

Serene Scene in Oxford

I agree with this sentiment, but we didn’t have a chance to check out this museum.

We got off the bus near the Divinity School and went in a pub called the White Horse. We shared a ploughman’s lunch and a scone and got a few drinks, then walked over to the Bodleian. For us, I think this was the right choice to fulfill our Harry Potter sightseeing needs. Not only did we get to see a few filming locations (the library and the Divinity School, which served as the infirmary in the films), but we also got to see a magnificent library dating back to 1488!

The Divinity School, Tower of Five Orders

The tour was rather long, but we got to sit down (!) for much of it while the guide explained the various rooms we were seeing and provided a wealth of information about the college. We lucked out that there were no readers in Duke Humphry’s Library, so we could talk freely in there–no shushing us. It was really interesting to learn how libraries operated through the centuries, with books being chained to desks so patrons would not walk off with them. As part of the tour we also were allowed inside the Radcliffe Camera (no connection to Daniel Radcliffe), which was a gorgeous building. There were readers in there, so I had to laugh as the guide was softly whispering information and we all leaned in really, really close to hear. It was like a football huddle.

The Convocation House’s ceiling was mesmerizing. The ceilings throughout the school are beautiful.

The tour we took is offered only on Sundays, and the guide said that it rarely includes the Radcliffe Camera. We had to relinquish all of our bags–they were stowed away for us in a locked box–and photography was permitted only on the first floor. I thought it was terrific even without the Harry Potter angle. In fact, I think we were the only ones there who cared about that, and the tour consisted of many local, older folks.

After viewing so many books, we headed over to Blackwell’s to shop for additions to our own libraries. (I bought the British version of the first Harry Potter Book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and The Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter.)

Our final stop in Oxford was the Eagle and Child pub, a spot frequented by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis back in their day. The pub seemed to be out of everything we tried to order, so we finally settled on steak-frites, which we all enjoyed, which was a bonus because we were there more for the atmosphere than for the food. I was inspired to ponder strange other worlds and the true meaning of life. Also, we had a deep discussion over whether HP Sauce is the same as Heinz 57.

It’s always fun when there are characters hanging around, giving a place some atmosphere.

We can’t know where this fellow was going, but it would have been fun (or perhaps horrifying) to follow him and find out.

If only Merry and Pippin had really been there!

When we returned to the hotel, we flipped on the TV and happened upon a show set in Oxford. Could have been Inspector Morse/Lewis/Endeavor…something like that. Anyway, it was fun seeing many of the places we had just seen in person.