It was with great excitement yesterday that I walked down Diagon Alley, the tumbledown high street where the young wide-eyed Harry Potter made his first foray into the world of wizardly wonders - until I realised something was bothering me, something childish but a little bit heartbreaking.
I had been invited to watch Boris Johnson put the finishing touches on the set before it becomes one of the key attractions at a new museum, a village of warehouses in Leavesden just outside London, which contains the best sets from the Harry Potter films, due to open to the public on 31 March 2012.
Johnson had the honour of placing Harry Potter’s wand on the famous faded velvet cushion in the window of Ollivanders, purveyors of quality magic wands. That honour was bestowed on the Mayor of London for good reason: Diagon Alley is a part of London. Accessible to the magically-inclined via a grubby back alley on the Charing Cross Road, the street is described by author JK Rowling as "the centre of wizarding London". (And I won’t deny that Johnson cut an appropriate figure, purposefully sweeping his white hair to the side as he made his way down those gloriously Dickensian cobbled streets.)
Diagon Alley was the perfect choice of set to unveil first. Of the 15 hours worth of Harry Potter films and multi-million pounds worth of magnificent sets, the scene in which Harry Potter arrives in Diagon Alley remains, a decade on, the clearest in my memory. That was the moment JK Rowling described in the book thus: "Harry wished he had eight more eyes... There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before...”
Ten years ago this Christmas, when the first Potter film was released in cinemas, we were there with him. The scene was the first to give cinematic vision to our long-imagined private worlds of Potter magic, and they did so in a craftily realistic way. That was one thing that struck me: there was no silliness. The mechanics of the place had been worked out so as to be credible to our eyes; real bats hung upside down from shop signs but, still, wand boxes collected dust just as the books do in any struggling independent specialist book shop. No wonder production designer Stuart Craig has won so many awards for making this magic.
The truth is, a decade after falling for this film set inside, stepping onto the painted plastic cobbles of the real set, there was one thought that kept surging through my mind. It was not strictly disappointment, after all I hadn’t been expecting Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes to hit my eye “like a firework display" – not even Warner Bros.’ insurance policy could cover that, even if they could recreate the book's vision so thoroughly. No, it was more of a belittling feeling. Standing there, you are more aware than ever of the giant, endlessly frustrating caveat that exists between the imagination and the real world. I had never felt more anchored in the world of muggles in my life.
I had once, aged ten, made a vow to myself never to go onto a film set again. My father was a set designer and we, as his children, were granted a tour of the set of BBC One’s adaptation of The Borrowers where I layed eyes on something horrific: one of the lead Borrowers, a fully-grown human being with a bad temper take a fag break next to a four-meter-wide safety pin and a giant polystyrene potato.
That crushing moment when you realise the reality you believe on screen is a trick of lighting, acting and nifty editing, was only marginally less heartbreaking as a grown up. But then, I am a firm believer in good old movie magic.
