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Magic’s been a-brewing at the Warner Bros Studios. After the arrival of the spider-filled Forbidden Forest and a gleaming Hogwarts Express, it’s now the turn of Gringotts’ goblins to slytherin to action at Leavesden’s Harry Potter studio tour.
In the attraction’s biggest expansion to date, visitors can now walk through a perfect replica of Gringotts Wizarding Bank. The bombastic banking hall has been designed and built by many of the film’s original crew and it’s packed with wooden desks loaded with inkwells and quills, piles of galleons, sickles and knuts, towering marble pillars and huge crystal chandeliers.
There are special displays explaining how the monied goblins were brought to life for the films. Each of the prosthetic masks took weeks to create, with every hair individually inserted and every vein carefully handpainted.
You’ll find props here that haven’t been seen since filming of the magical franchise ended in 2010, including the eye-popping Lestrange vault where you can try your luck at spotting the Sword of Gryffindor and Helga Hufflepuff’s cup hidden among 38,000 pieces of rubberised wizarding treasures.
But it’s when you reach the dust and rubble-filled set of the destroyed banking hall from ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ that you’ll get seriously spellbound by a life-size (and very realistic) Ukrainian Ironbelly dragon.
The all-new Wizarding Bank is a permanent 16,500 sq ft expansion to the existing tour. And while the miserly Gringotts goblins might flinch at the entry price, there’s enough filmmaking magic here to convert more than a few muggles.