Ever since JK Rowling first published her first story of the boy who lived, theories of what inspired Harry Potter – and the magical world – have circled. Cafés and landmarks everywhere from Scotland to Portugal display signs claiming to have played host to JK Rowling while she wrote the series – or more boldly, to be the inspiration for the likes of Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, and Hogsmeade.
Fortunately, one fan worked up the courage back in 2020 to ask the author about it on Twitter, and she gave a lengthy response. “If you define the birthplace of Harry Potter as the moment when I had the initial idea, then it was a Manchester-London train,” she wrote. “But I’m perennially amused by the idea that Hogwarts was directly inspired by beautiful places I saw or visited, because it’s so far from the truth.” She then contradicted statements that she had used a 14th-century street known as the Shambles in York as a model for Diagon Alley, and that any of Edinburgh’s landmarks really shaped her conception of Hogwarts.
“A truthful tour of HP ‘inspirations’ would involve a stationery guide pointing a stick at a picture of my head, which would be zero fun and nobody would buy tickets,” she said. “If I’d genuinely been inspired by every old building, creepy alleyway, pub, graveyard and underpass that’s claimed, I’d have spent my late twenties on a non-stop road trip between locations, and I promise I didn’t. I was mostly sitting in places I could get a cheap coffee/could afford the rent and making it all up.”
As for where she typed up the first lines of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone? “The first bricks of Hogwarts were laid in a flat in Clapham Junction,” she explained, along with a photograph of the building where she was “renting a room” over “what was then a sports shop”. Sweeter still, she wrote the chapter in which Harry gets his first wand from Ollivanders under a tree – even posting a photograph of it, although she refused to reveal its exact location. “I can’t absolutely guarantee they haven’t taken away the old tree & planted a new one in the same corner of the field. I haven’t been there for nearly 30 years. But I think it’s this one.”
The author admits that she did, however, write parts of the series in numerous spots, such as the Elephant Café in Edinburgh and The Majestic Café in Porto. One place she especially remembers? An old café on Edinburgh’s Nicolson Street. “That one’s true! I used to write in Nicolsons all the time. I once wrote an entire chapter in there in one sitting and barely changed a word afterwards. Those are the days you remember. I think Nicolsons is now a Chinese restaurant.”
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