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The Harry Potter Locations Tour

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Just a quick reminder that our Harry Potter London walks are available as a free pdf download.

We say walks plural because the tour is actually divided up into several different areas around London.

The Walks in Harry Potter’s London are free, albeit they are DIY tours.

 But, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense to do a Harry Potter tour on your own by following our carefully planned out step by step Walking Tour directions.

Firstly, you are not confined to a particular start time whereby you have to be at a specific point at a specified time. With our free Harry Potter London Tour you can start it at any time you wish.

Secondly, you’ll see more atcual Harry Potter film locations than with the paid for London walks. It is our belief that if you want to do a Harry Potter Walk of London then you want to actually see as many of the locations used in the films as possible.

To only take you to a small number of locations and then fill the rest of the tour is with topics and places that are not actually related to the Harry Potter film locations isn’t really fair on you.

Our Harry Potter London Tour and Treasure Hunt takes you to almost all the locations in London where the films have been shot.

Thirdly, we are great believers in step by step directions. We won’t tell you to go and sit in a pub or a cafe and read about interesting locations close by.

Our philosophy is to get you out there, actually walking through the streets of London enjoying the places you are reading about by actually being there.

Finally, the Harry Potter London Tour is also structured like a London treasure hunt, so the kids can be kept occupied throughout.

Best of all the whole thing is 100% free. You simply have to send an e-mail to:-

harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com and, as if by magic, your Harry Potter London walk will be with you within moments.

Due to the exceptionally high demand for our tour we regret that you can only obtaain this one of our free London walks by sending your request to the aforementioned email address.

The Tour is a 30 page booklet that you then just print off and do as and when you choose. You set the pace, and can spend as much or as little time at the locations as you wish.

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Harry Potter Walks London.

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

We are going to take a break from our London walks of art and return to the theme of our great Free Harry Potter Tour of London.

We are currently receiving around 20 requests a day for our London walks Harry Potter Treasure Hunt and Walking Tour and are receiving some pretty good feedback from people who have taken it and have enjoyed it immensely.

The Harry Potter film locations walk was updated at the end of September, following the closure of the Thames Footpath between Blackfriars Bridge and The Founders Arms Pub.

This section of the London Riverside Walks is going to be closed for sometime, a few years at least, but the detour isn’t that bad and adds, at most an extra fifteen minutes walking onto the Harry Potter London Tour.

If you are not familiar with this great free London walk then it is a full tour of London that takes in the movie locations where the Harry Potter films are shot.

So, for example, we visit Diagon Alley, the Leaky Cauldron, Platform nine and three quarters, not to mention Gringotts bank and sundry other locations associated with the Harry Potter locations in London.

But the tour is also a fully paced out London Walking Tour that is structured to include a London Treasure Hunt so that parents with children can enjoy a memorable day out in London that won’t cost the earth.

To receive this memorable one of our London walks you simply have to send an email to harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com and, before you can say Hogwarts, the full downloadable pdf will be winging its way to you.

You simply then print it off (it runs to 30 pages) and then go off an explore Harry Potter’s London at your own pace and in your won time.

It’s as simple as that!

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Free Walks In London.

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

You’ve probably noticed as you read the snippets of information on our blogs, or as you look at the selection of London walks that we offer, that we have a whole selection of walks that are free.

Most popular of these is our fantastic Harry Potter London Tour, which is a download PDF that you can then print off and follow the step by step instructions at you own pace.

In addition to this, we are in the process of adding the finishing touches to our London Pub Walk, and we will soon be adding a great new family walk that will follow the same format as our Harry Potter Tour in that it will be a London Treasure Hunt and London Walking Tour, but which will be a City Safari.

We have also started work on a new video which we hope will go live soon and which will introduce you to one of London’s most poignant monuments.

Our paid regular tours are still going strong and our Jack the Ripper Tour is still selling out every night.

Richard’s Haunted London walks that take place on Friday and Saturday nights are back in full throttle now that the night’s are, once again, getting dark.

We will shortly be introducing you to our great Blue Badge Guides who have now started to join Richard to lead some of the London Walking Tours through the streets of the old City.

In addition they will be offering a series of new tours that are shaping up to be really exciting.

On the Jack the Ripper Walk front we’ll be making an exciting announcement later this month. But we’ve also managed to negotiate a special discount for our walkers on copies of  Richard’s acclaimed book Uncovering Jack the Ripper’s London and we’ll roll out details of that offer later this week.

The Australian Band Spiral Dance have approached Richard about putting one of his poems to music and releasing it on their next album, whilst a group of students in Texas have added  a spooky soundtrack to another of Richard’s Poems and recorded it for Halloween.

Details of  both of these will be posted here soon.

In addition Richard has spent the summer working with one of Britain’s most respected actors on a project to do with London that will be coming together in the next few months.

So all in all, things are really busy for us and our London walks are forging ahead to give you more of London.

So keep on coming back to read our blogs and to enjoy the many snippets of information we post on our Walking Tours of London site.

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Harry Potter Walks London - Update

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Our Harry Potter London walks have undergone a new update. We have now arrived at version six of the tour since, as we stated in July, the east bound Thames Path over Blackfriars Bridge has closed to facilitate the expansion and redevelopement of Blackfriars Station.

It’s going to look great when it’s finished but in the meantime it’s added a little bit of extra walking to the Harry Potter London walks.

In a nutshell, when you have crossed over Blackfriars Bridge, you just need to veer left and cross the road by the crossing just after Dogget’s Coat and Badge. Once on the other side you turn right walk down to the busy traffic junction and turn left along Southwark Street. Having traipsed under the railway bridge you go first right along Hopton Street and then just keep straight (you’ll need to walk through a covered passage that passes under the light brown brick buildings at the end) until you reach the riverside again by the Founders Arms Pub.

That’s it really, nothing that major, just a little extra walking which, as walking in London is extremely good for you, can’t be a bad thing!

Our Harry Potter London walks PDF has been updated to include this new detour so why not request you copy of this exciting innovative and, best of all, absolutley free London walking tour and London Treasure hunt?

Since we have now automated the whole process, getting hold of a copy couldn’t be easier. Simply send an email requesting one to harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com and, as if by magic, you’ll receive a copy almost immediately.

You then print off your copy (it runs to 30 pages by the way) and off you go. The great thing about this is that, unlike other London walks where you have to be at a station at a specific time and join a group of other people who follow one guide, this is a stand alone do it yourself tour of London. So you set your own pace, you do it as and when you choose and you can stop as often as you wish.

Since there are lots of wonderful things to see on the route that will appeal to parents and chilren alike, it really does make sense to be independent. To get out of the herd mentality of just following a guide and experience London on your won with the help of our carefully planned out step by step directions.

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Harry Potter London walks - They’re Free!

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

Tomorrow, Sunday, why not enjoy a day exploring London on one of our free London walks.

Our Harry Potter Tour of London will take you on a magical journey all over London.

You’ll see many of the places that were used in the Harry Potter films, you’ll enjoy a wonderfully relaxing walk around London, and you’ll also be able to keep the kids occupied by our London Treasure Hunt that is incorporated into the Harry Potter London walks.

Getting hold of your free copy of the walk couldn’t be easier as the whole process is automated. Simply ping a quick email to

harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com

and, as if by magic, within around 40 seconds are wizards and goblins will spring into action, wave their wands and, lo and behold, the Harry Potter Tour pdf will arrive in your mail box.

The pdf is a 30 page booklet which you then print out and then you head off into central London and simply follow the step by step instructions.

We last checked the route on 8th September so its very up to date and it even features the locations from the latest film Harry Potter and the half Blood Prince.

We’ve had a great deal of interest shown in the Harry Potter London Tour since we launched it in May and many people who have taken it have emailed to say what a great time they had and thanking us for  putting this free resource out there.

We can only send it via the automated system as it takes us rather a long time to up load and send the PDF manually (three minutes to be precise).

So please don’t request the PDF via our contact form as we won’t be able to send it. Simply email us at harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com and you’ll get the whole tour as a PDF by return.

We are currently compiling a few more London walks that can be sent by PDF for you to do at your own pace so be sure to return in a few weeks to see what else we have to offer.

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Our Harry Potter London walks

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

For those of you not familiar with the history of our unique London walks around the Harry Potter film locations here is a little background.

In 2007 Richard and Joanne Jones and their two sons, Thomas (10) and William (8)  decided to put together a London walk that would allow parents and children to explore all the Harry Potter film locations in London.

The tours then on offer were either very expensive or were London walks that weren’t really relevant to the Harry Potter theme.

What Richard and Joanne decided to do was to put together a tour of London that parents and children could do on their own and for free. They also decided that, to keep the children occupied, it might be an idea to include a London Treasure Hunt as part of the tour.

And thus was born the Harry Potter London Tour and Treasure Hunt. Beginning at Temple Underground Station they began pacing out a tour of London and visited all the harry Potter film location sites in London.

Gradually the tour came together and by December 2008 it was ready to go live on the internet. However, the problem with the website was that if parents wanted to print it off it ran to somewehere in the region of 90 or so cumbersome pages.

The whole ethos behind the Harry Potter London walks was that they were intended to offer a day out in London for families that wouldn’t cost parents the earth.

So in May 2009 the Harry Potter tour was turned into a dowlaodable PDF file that printed out at just 28 to 30 pages.

Joanne and Richard expected a handful of requests and so were had planned to simply email the pdf manually.

However, the Harry Potter London walking tour proved more popular than they imagined and they were soon having to manually upload and send over 100 pdf’s a day.

Casting round for a more labour efficient way to send the pdf they hit upon the idea of an automated response. Having tested this under all conditions they were delighted to find that it actually worked.

Not only did this mean that they didn’t have to spend two or so hours a day responding to the Harry Potter London tour requests, it also meant that those who requested the free London walks would not have to wait till Richard and Joanne were able to respond to receive the tour. Within minutes of them sending the request the pdf would be in their in box - as if by magic! It’s just a great one of the things to do in London.

So why not but this to the test yourself? Just send your request to

harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com

Then sit back and listen to the ping as it arrives. You then simply print it off and away you go exploring the streets of London on the first of a series of what, we hope, will be great London walks for families and anyone else interested in seeing more of London.

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A Walk in London

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

London walks are a great way to get to know and to explore London. There are, of course, many companies that offer guided tours that you can join for a modest fee, which is often around £7.

However, we are the only one of all the London walks companies that offers you free DIY self guided tours.

Why do we do this?

Quite simply because we are 100% passionate about London and we want as many people as possible to get the thrill of discovering parts of this great city that they might otherwise miss.

That is why we have been sending out our Harry Potter London Tour (we recently sent out 50 downloads in one day!) and that is why we have a whole range of London walks on our sister site www.walksoflondon.co.uk.

We will be doing the update on our Harry Potter Tour today and will be including the brief opening segment which has some fantastic views of London’s magnificent skyline.  The new version of the tour (our fourth version this year) will go live on Thursday.

We are just putting the finishing touches to our Riverside Pub walk that will take you into some of the Thames’s most atmospheric and historic riverside pubs. In striving to make the tour unique we’ve come up with a very novel idea that we’re sure you will love when you see what it is.

We’re also putting together an in depth DIY London tour that will take you to all the major sights in a day and will also enable you to enjoy some of the more secret places that this great City has to offer. London walks don’t come better than that - a tour that covers the whole of London.

September 3rd will be the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two and in the lead up we will be adding to our previous blogs that covered London in the Blitz.

Of course we do also conduct our own guided London walks on which our expert guides will introduce you to themes such as Jack the Ripper’s East End, the Alleyways and Shadows of the Old City haunted London walk. and the Ghosts, Ghouls and Graveyards tour. For details of these walks please visit our dedicated website at www.rippertour.com.

The Harry Potter tour update will be going live on Thursday so please check back with the website if you would like the most up to date version of this higly popular London walk. You can receive it by sending us an email request to

harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com

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Guess Who that is on our Walks in London?

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Our Harry Potter London walks have been causing quite a stir and it’s easy to see why. They offer parents with children a full day out in London that costs next to nothing and yet keeps the kids occupied throughout.

The reason? Not only do they get to see the Harry Potter London film locations but they also get to enjoy a treasure hunt that takes them all over London.

They might have to find funny faces on the walls of buildings. They will find themselves looking for the Rats Tails inside one of London’s most historic churches.

In addition parents and children will enjoy a whole series of short London walks that will introduce them to places they would never dream existed.

This is a constant comment by those who have emailed us to say how much they have enjoyed the Harry Potter London walk.

However, on Sunday 28th June 2009 one family were following our Harry Potter Tour route to the site of the Ministry of Magic when they walked straight into a film shoot for the next Harry Potter film,  The Deathly Hallows.

Not only did they get to see a scene that they recognised from the book being filmed but they actually got to see Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, as Daniel Radcliff and Rupert Grint were on set.

Needless to say they were thrilled by this unexpected turn of events and they emailed us to let us know how this was ” an unexpected, happy surprise and a great story thanks to your walking tour!”

Now we know that we can’t claim the credit for the fact they were filming in the streets covered by our London walks on the day and at the time that this family chose to do our Harry Potter Tour (how great would it be if we could lay this on every time?!) but it just goes to show why Walking in London is one of the best ways to get to see the city.

Had this family been on a bus tour they might have caught a brief  glimpse of the filming as the bus sped along Whitehall, but it would have remained just that - a brief glimpse.

Yet here was a family that took to their feet, and walked around London and this great city did what it so often does for those who take the time to explore it on walks - it surprised them and gave them something to remember for years to come. Something that, no doubt they will look back fondly on when they see Harry Potter and the Deathly Halllows.

If you would like a copy of our free London walks Harry Potter Tour please send us an email to

harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com

and, as if by magic, our automated process will send you a 30 page PDF booklet that you can just print off and follow.

Now we have to tackle the problem of topping Harry Potter turning up on our Harry Potter London Tour route!

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Walks of London

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Walking is truly one of the best ways to see more of London. Setting off into the historic backstreets on foot ensures that you get to both see and feel the atmosphere of different London streets.

Our London walks have well and truly got London covered. We have Walking tours in places as diverse as the lovely village of Hampstead, the secret streets of Clerkenwell, the vibrant streets of Soho, and even the squares and passageways in the Royal village of St. James.

All these neighbourhoods of London have some true treats for those who take the trouble to venture into their backstreets and by joining one of our London walks you get to hear anecdotes and lots of history about each of the places passed as you make your way through streets and thoroughfares that are untouched by time.

But, in addition to our guided walks of London we also offer a series of free print off and do yourself walking tours. These can be viewed on our sister site www.walksoflondon.co.uk. On this site you will be able to explore Dickens London, Docklands. You can also enjoy a self guided walk through the village of Clerkenwell that was recently featured in The Los Angeles Times.

Of late the most popular of our free London walks has been the Harry Potter Tour which we offer as a free print off and do 28 page booklet. This has been extremely well received and to date we have sent out in access of 2,000 PDF downloads for this tour.

Many people have emailed back to say how much fun they had on our Harry Potter Tour and one lady even wrote in to tell how, as she and her family were walking the route they got a surprise that was way beyond their expectations.

Where as we can’t take credit for the actual surprise, we can most certainly take responsibility for guiding her and her family to the spot where she had the ultimate luck for anyone enjoying a tour around the Harry Potter film locations in London.

Walks are what make this sort of thing possible. On a bus tour you are behind glass or up on a top deck far away from the actual streets of London. Your sightseeing takes place in a vacuum as it were.

But with a London Walking Tour you are there on the streets, walking through the streets and every fascinating aspect of this magnificent city, every surprise that is there to surprise you become real and immediate.

In tomorrow’s blog we will reveal just how special the surprise was for the family who were doing our Harry Potter London walk. But, for now, if you would like a copy of the free PDF of the tour ( a 28 page booklet no less) then please send an email to

harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com

and we’ll email it to you within 24 hours.

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Harry Potter Walk - London

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

We’re about to make the necessary amendments to our Harry Potter London walks and treasure hunt to take in the locations used in the new film Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

To be honest London doesn’t feature that much in the film, apart from a thrilling sequence at the beginning which is guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine of anyone who decides to take a stroll over the Millennium Bridge!

The film begins with a wonderful ariel view over London and at first it is the City that those who have joined us on our London walks will instantly recognise.

But all is not well in the world of the Muggles. No sooner do you recognise familiar landmarks than dark shadows come shooting down from the sky. They are the Death Eaters en route to wreak havoc on Muggles London.

Walks that feature the locations that are used in this first scene are plentiful. Suffice it to say that there is a wonderful view of Trafalgar Square, after which the Death Eaters race past the Church of St, Martin in the Fields, past Leicester Square Underground Station and onwards and upwards.

The next scene shows a long view of St Paul’s Cathedral looking over the Millennium Bridge. The shadows come up from behind the dome and then swoop down onto the bridge itself causing it to twist and buckle before it breaks up and falls into the River Thames.It really is an exciting sequence.

The last view shows the Death Eaters flying over  Tate Modern, which looks particularly good in the scene.

Thereafter the rest of the film takes place way out of London as Harry and his friends do battle with all manner of enemies both within and without Hogwarts.

You can get your free PDF of our Harry Potter London walks by emailing us at harry-potter-pdf@discovery-walks.com and we’ll respond within five minutes attaching a copy of our 28 page PDF booklet of the Harry Potter London walks.

Whilst we’re on the subject of our Harry Potter London walk, one of the people who did the tour at the end of June got a really nice surprise as they were following the route. We’ll tell you what it was in Friday’s Blog.

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