Clueless Girl About London: Visiting Platform 9 3/4

Visiting Platform 9 3/4 from the Harry Potter movies was the first thing I did on the very first day I arrived in London (from Los Angeles, if you were wondering). If I'm being honest, it was actually the second thing. The first thing I really did was walked my jet lagged ass to Charles Dickens's house because it was just a "few" blocks from our hotel and I thought, "awesome I'll just throw that in on my walk to King's Cross Station". Sure it was in the opposite direction, but still walkable. And it would have been totally worth the circuitous route and extra walking if the house museum had been open! But alas, it was not. There was a ginormous wall, with pictures of the inside of the house, and a history of the house explaining that the Dickens house would be closed for renovation until December. So, that sucked for me.

I am a fairly big Harry Potter fan, but admittedly maybe not as big as some others. I've seen the movies tons of times, I've read the series twice, and I did devote a day to visiting the Leavesden Studios, which I'll blog about at a later time. But I've never dressed as a character, attended any conventions, or tattooed anything on my person, and I forget a lot of character names easily. So there's that.

Anyway, Platform 9 3/4, is in King's Cross Station in London and not very hard to find. When we were there there was some construction so I'm not sure what the entrance will be like when it's all done but when we walked in, we basically walked straight ahead, towards the back, and found a brick wall, with half a cart in it, between a gift shop (with many HP items) and the ticket counters.



You'll walk in through that back entrance you can kind of see in this pic. What you see here should be on your right, and just past it is the "Platform".


 It's sectioned off, though we couldn't tell if it was for a line to form, or, so that people did not walk directly in front of your picture as you were taking it. We found most everybody just huddled around either section and kind of took turns walking up to the cart for their picture. We were there roughly at around 2 p.m. on a Friday in September and there were maybe a dozen people there taking pictures. We happened to be at King's Cross for a train later on the next week, and at that time there was absolutely no one there, so it's pretty random whether you'll have to wait a bit to take your pic, or whether you'll be able to walk right up to it. Unfortunately, you cannot get a pic of the train station platform itself (as it appears in the movie) unless you have a ticket for a train that is scheduled to depart from any of those platforms.

The whole thing once at King's Cross should take no more than five to ten minutes, based on our experience. By the way, just across the way is St. Pancra's Station, the exterior of which was used for the movies, but especially noticeable in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.