THE FREE WIZARDS LONDON TOUR
WALKERS FEEDBACK

My wife, 9 year old daughter and myself just returned from A trip to London. With my daughter fully infatuated with Harry Potter we were looking to combine the sights of London with the book series.

I stumbled upon your walking tour while surfing the Internet. After printing it out and bringing it overseas we were unsure what to expect.

Your tour was awesome.

The whole family loved it. From the scavenger hunt, to random sights to see, to tying the scenes of the movie to specific locations was fantastic.

We did the tour over 2 days with many side trips (to St. Paul's cathedral, Shakespeare's Globe, art museum, The Monument, and others).We just wanted to send you an email to thank you for all the time and effort you put into your tour.

We spent two discussing door knockers, Diagonal Alley, and searching for all your clues.

My daughter said the walking tour was her favorite part of our entire trip and my wife and I agree.

Thank you for giving my family such a wonderful experience.

Sincerely

Patrick Macarchuk

Hi,

Thank you very much for this tour.

My kids enjoyed it very much. We did it in little steps and it was really great.

Thanks a lot.

Best regards

Dinah

Hi Richard

Thanks for the harry potter walk we did it this afternoon it was amazing

I gave your email address to my friend as she was interested hope thats ok thanks again.

Maria Robertson

Hi Richard

My son and I did the Harry Potter tour on Monday of half term last week and we had a great time.

My son is nearly 6 so I missed out quite a bit of the extra things, such as visiting Lambeth Palace, The Golden Hinde etc and we stuck to the main film locations, which took us much of the day.

We walked about 4.5m in total, I later worked out, and caught various public transport options in between.

One thing we did find, which may be of interest, is a shop called Mr Simm's old fashioned sweet shop in New Row. The shop is just like Honeyduke's and better still they sell a number of Harry Potter themed sweets. We bought a specially made up bag full for £7.50 which included chocolate frogs and wizards, every flavour beans (including bogie and vomit flavours), liquorice wands, jelly basilisks and Sherbet Lemons. My son was thoroughly impressed.

Overall we had a great day and am happy to recommend where I can.

We have already told a few of our friends about it.

I have great pictures of my son, in full wizard regalia, trying to push the trolley through the wall at Platform 9 and3/4.

Many thanks and kind regards

Maria Thomas

Dear Richard

This is a very belated thank you but I just wanted to say what a fantastic day out I had with my 3 children in London using your guide.

Everyone (girls aged 13 and 10, boy aged 7 and me) thought the tour was a wonderful way to see new areas of London as well as those previously visited to rediscover them, and also to take alleyways and routes we wouldn't have dreamt of turning down.

I also took the treasure hunt clues from the website as I don't think they were all in the pdf and they were great.

I was able to choose where to start the route to fit with our travel in and out of London and the directions were amazing - every little detail there so no doubt (or stress) as to which way to go.

I have raved about the tour to many others with children and pointed them to your website.

Have to confess, one unexpected highlight had us all very excited..... Just outside Gringotts bank (Australia House) we were crossing the road and who was sitting in his car at the crossing none other than Dumbledore - Michael Gambon!! Talk about coincidences.

One of the best, if not the best, days out we've had in London.

Thanks.

Tracy Bury

Dear Sir,

I just wanted to thank you for making the Harry Potter walking tour available.

My wife, 13 year-old daughter and I were in London 2 weeks ago and very much enjoyed following your instructions, which took us to parts of London I had never seen, despite having stayed there for a month during my student days many years ago.

Had I suggested a walking tour of London, I fear our daughter would have balked.

The Harry Potter theme kept her engaged and excited and we spent some wonderful family time together.

Thank you for this gift!

Sincerely,

Auguste Fortin,

Hello,

I've just ended my vacation with my wife in London and we wanted to thank you for that great Tour and Treasure Hunt.

We very much enjoyed it. I think without the directions of the tour we would have misses many great Sights in London.

I am especially thankful, that the tour did not only cover Harry Potter locations, for my wife is not that into Harry Potter, but with all the other interesting things to see it was great for her too.

Again thank you very much for the work.

cheers

Thomas and Julia from Kiel, Germany

Hello Richard!

No problems with downloading! I'm looking forward on doing this tour.

My boyfriend and I are from Belgium and we are HUGE HP-fans. I'm so thrilled!

I really think it is great you put so much effort in creating tours in a free way.

It really makes London accessible for younger couples.

I have respect for your efforts and I will pass it through in a free way.

I will take pictures of our tour and I will definitely send you feedback!

We are going to London in October.

Thanks again!

Greetings

Aaron and Sofie

Richard,

I just wanted to let you know that your tour made my trip to London such a fun experience!

My best friend and I absolutely loved wandering the city, finding little Harry Potter treasures along the way.

We also really appreciated that you included other sights we passed such as Chris Wren's house and the random Ferryman's stool.

We never would have known about them otherwise!

Thanks again so much, we really appreciate the effort you put into this and wouldn't have had as great of a time in London had it not been for your tour.

Thanks!!

Elizabeth

I just want to thank you for the wonderful tour you have put together.

We spent our first two days in London following your well laid out plans.

We felt the tour was remarkably easy to follow, terrifically fun and the best possible introduction to the city for four newcomers AND it was all done for free (we already had tube cards).

I cannot thank you enough for all the hard work you have obviously put into this.

We are certainly pointing everyone else who we know who are visiting London towards your website.

Thanks,

Hadley Barth

Richard,

My family and I did part of your Harry potter walking tour in London on Sunday, 28th June 2009.

The highlight of the tour was when we turned down the street where the exterior of the Ministry of Magic was filmed.

By chance we happened upon a film crew who was filming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Unfortunately we were not able to walk under the arch but we did get to watch some filming and caught a glimpse of two of the main actors Daniel Radcliff (Harry) and Rupert Grint (Ron).

This was an unexpected, happy surprise and a great story thanks to your walking tour!

Kind regards,

Rebecca Tullett

Hi Richard

I had a fab day in London yesterday thanks to your tour.

We stopped off at Somerset house, while the children played in the fountains, Trafalgar Square was great - the lions proved great excitement, we managed to hear the bells at the St Clements church; it was all amazing.

Thank you.

Keep up the good work.

Linda Mills

Hello Richard,

Thank you very much for the Harry Potter tour.

We've enjoyed it very much.

We've picked some things we really wanted to see out of your walk, because we didn't have a lot of time on our hands.

Best wishes,

Ineke and Nikki. out of the Netherlands

Took young family on the walk yesterday (14,11 and 2 year old) done temple to horseguards so far, next part next week.

We thought it was brilliant, so many weird places to visit, I've lived in London for 37 years and thought I knew most places, brilliant.

Thank you for the free tour and hope to see you all on a ripper tour in the not to distant future.

Chris Rotchell

P.S. brilliant touch with the treasure hunt, we loved it...

Dear Sir/Madame,

My name is Freddy and I am a 19 year old boy from Holland. I live in a little town called Boerenhol.

I was searching on the internet and I found the site and the-magician.co.uk I was really impressed of the tours your company made possible.

Me and my fiancee Linde are the biggest fans of Harry Potter and we would love to be a part of the tour for our honeymoon.

Our first date was at the cinema by the first movie of Harry Potter that's why this is our dream-tour.

Thank you,

Freddy and Linde

Hi Richard,

Many thanks for the harry potter tour through London, with which we had a lot of fun last weekend!

Of course we want to support you with our feedback concerning the tour: - first of all: it was great to see all the original places out of the films we have watched so often!

The tour was very time consuming, and as we wanted to do it within one day, we left out the "additional London details" (perhaps you can offer both: a harry potter tour and an extended harry potter tour with additional London details).

As already mentioned in your mail: kings cross scene did change a lot, so you should rework the last part with platform 9 and 3/4, but nice people at the railway station will also help to find it :-)

Again, we really enjoyed your tour and like to thank you a lot for it!

Best regards,

Jens and Joanna

Thanks, Richard and friends.

This is a great resource. And - I've just posted about it on one of the world's greatest travel websites, Slow Travel, where I'm one of the moderators.

Thanks again for making this available - this will be great fun, and will give us a focus as we explore London with our two (14 and 18) grandsons in June.

Judy Roberts (AKA Tourmama)

Dear Richard.

We really enjoyed your tour. Thank you very much for this great adventure.

At our first day in London we made The Original Tour. At the second day we started with your Harry Potter Tour.

We were so happy to do it by our own without a tour guide.

Although our English is not so good (normal school English), we could handle it without dictionary.

We divided the tour into three sections. Your tour is not simply a Harry Potter Tour, but gives a lot of information about the attractions of London.

We liked Goodwin's Court most. Without your guide we had never been interested in walking through this passageway.

Best Wishes

Silke and Ian from Hamburg

Dear Richard,

Thank you very much for your very quick reply.

We are so excited to start out on this tour as we are huge Harry Potter fans.

Me and my daughter are doing a London summer to minimum cost (which indeed really is possible!) so I was over the moon to see this tour.

I will of course let a lot of people know about this tour.

And we will of course look out for other tours that you put together.

Thanks again

Kind regards

Anna and Emily

Thank you, thank you!

My kids and I did (part) of your walk just before seeing the Harry Potter movie, and while the HP stuff was interesting, the walk was entertainment in itself.

A great wander through a part of London we haven’t discovered – a really memorable part of our summer.

Thanks again!

Mary Crowley

Hi there

Thanks for the info – just to let you know that we did the walk last Monday and Thursday – found a lot of things that I had never seen in London before and thoroughly enjoyed it, even if we couldn’t find the platform 9¾ sign in a busy 5pm Kings Cross Station and gave up!

Honestly though, thanks for a great couple of days in London – we actually went into everything we could – somerset house, st clements church, Sherlock holmes pub (!!!!!), Diagon alley and the Borough Market and lots of other places that I never knew were there.

Thanks again

Regards,

Lorraine Brown

Thank you SO much for doing this - what a wonderful gift to Harry Potter fans everywhere!

My son and I had a marvelous time in London doing all this for free!

A great big thank you.

Wishing you all the best.

Sam Metcalfe

Thank you very much!

I downloaded it to my iPod and opened it in my iBooks application and it worked great. I'll definitely recommend it, thanks!

Alex

Dear Richard,

I downloaded your Harry Potter tour booklet about two weeks ago and enjoyed searching the locations while visiting London this week-end.

The tour is really, really well done as you list all the locations and as you precisely explain how to get there.

So I wanted to say thank you because there are no other great Harry Potter tour you can do on your own and I think it is very generous of you to make it available for free.

I do have some ideas to improve the tour:-

Even if I know that you want the tour to be free maybe it would be a good idea to write somewhere (at the end maybe?) some other harry potter related places you can visit but for which you have to pay... for example London museum where you can see some statues from which the chess pieces in ps are inspired or the zoo in which Harry sets the boa on Dudley...

Maybe you could also give some addresses of stores/shops where one can buy Harry Potter products (for example Hamley's toy store where there is a interesting amount of noble collection articles such as wands, time turners, the sword of griffindor and other movie replicas that are very exciting for HP fans)

It would also be great if you joined an image of the movie scene for every location you visit. If you put for example the location image on the booklet and next to it an image in which you actually see the characters at this place. I've seen that you're currently filming the locations but it would be great to have the images on the booklet and not needing internet when you're on location.

So these are the improvements I think you could make.

As a huge Harry Potter fan I say thank you for the amazing tour you've created!

Gilles Dufrasne

FROM RICHARD

Hi Gilles

Many thanks for those great suggestions.

I am looking at including the British Museum where the Lewis Chess men are displayed upon which the Chess men in the films were based.

I do try whenever I can to feature stores that sell Harry Potter products, such as the shop in Cecil Court that does Harry Potter money.

I would love to be able to put stills from the films upon the website and in the booklet so that people can see how the locations are used in the Harry Potter films.

Unfortunately Warner Bros don't allow it. I wrote to ask for permission but received the reply that they don't licence their material in this sort of way. So, much as I would like to do it, for copyright reasons I am unable to do so.

Thanks for the feedback and for the great suggestions.

Best Wishes

Richard

Hi Richard,

I just wanted to say how much my husband and I enjoyed the Harry Potter Tour you sent us.

Along with seeing the various film locations, we also saw lots of different sights that we wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Many Thanks again, it was great fun.

Best Wishes,

Sarah and Rob.

Hi Richard,

Many, many thanks for a very well written and fantastic Harry Potter tour.

We only saw the Diagon Alley and 'the Trolley' this time, but it was worth a lot to have your guide to these things.

Next time in London we will discover more of it- thanks again!!

I am recommending this to everyone going to London!

Best regards

Maria Stenberg

Dear Richard

Thank you very much for your thoughtful kindness.

We are now in our second generation of Harry Potter fans in our family.

With all best wishes

Karen and family (all Londoners too!!)