Harry Potter Guided Walking Tour London

Borough Market and the Leaky Cauldron

Borough Market in Southwark is London's most famous food market, with roots going back roughly a thousand years and a green iron-and-glass Victorian hall built in the 1850s. The walk starts nearby at Southwark View Point, behind Southwark Cathedral, the oldest Gothic church in London. Just beside the market, a narrow street of old brick buildings was dressed as the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron in the third film, when Harry arrives on the Knight Bus.

Your guide shows you the exact doorway and explains how the crew changed the street for filming. Borough Market is open most days and is worth a return visit for lunch; arriving a little early before the morning tour is a good way to see it. The riverside path from here passes the replica of a Tudor galleon and the ruins of a medieval bishop's palace.

The Millennium Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral

The Millennium Bridge opened in 2000 as the first new crossing of the Thames in central London for over a century, a sleek steel suspension footbridge linking the Globe Theatre side of the river with St Paul's Cathedral. In the opening of the sixth film the Death Eaters twist and destroy it, one of the most dramatic scenes in the series.

Walking across it with your guide you hear how that sequence was made and why the bridge was nicknamed the wobbly bridge when it first opened. Ahead rises the great dome of St Paul's Cathedral, completed in 1710 after the Great Fire of London. The bridge is also one of the best places in London for photos of the river and the city skyline.

Great Scotland Yard and the Ministry of Magic

Great Scotland Yard is a quiet street off Whitehall that gave its name to the Metropolitan Police, whose first headquarters stood here. In the fifth film it became the place where Harry and Mr Weasley step into a red telephone box and descend to the Ministry of Magic through the visitors' entrance.

Your guide brings the scene to life at the spot where it was filmed and shares more film trivia before you reach Trafalgar Square. Look out for the world's smallest police station, a tiny lookout built into a granite pillar at the corner of the square. Between the river and the West End you also enjoy views towards the London Eye and the Thames.

Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden

Trafalgar Square was laid out in the 1840s and is the great meeting place of central London, with fountains, bronze lions and the classical front of the National Gallery. From here the walk heads into Covent Garden, the lively piazza around the old covered market, famous for its street performers, small shops and cafés.

These stops are where the tour becomes a London sightseeing walk as well as a Harry Potter tour, which makes it ideal for first-time visitors who want to see the city's highlights on foot. The house quiz continues along the way, and your guide gives tips on what else to see nearby once the tour ends.

Diagon Alley lanes and the Palace Theatre

Between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane run narrow seventeenth-century lanes of antiquarian bookshops, print sellers and gaslit bow windows that are often called the real Diagon Alley, while darker, tighter passages nearby are linked with Knockturn Alley. They feel like a step back in time, and they are among the most photographed corners of the West End.

The walk ends on Shaftesbury Avenue at the Palace Theatre, a red-brick Victorian theatre from 1891 where the two-part stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has run since 2016. The final house scores are announced here, and you finish in the heart of the West End, close to Leicester Square, Soho and Covent Garden.