Pottermore, the restricted-access website for Harry Potter fans, launched this week – and on it, JK Rowling reveals that she subconsciously based Number Four Privet Drive on her own childhood home.
The author, who famously started writing Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone during a delayed Manchester-to-London train journey, has admitted that the Dursleys’ family house – in which Harry Potter spends the first few years of his life – has distinct echoes of her own childhood home in Winterbourne, near Bristol.
Rowling was not aware of how similar the two properties were until she entered the film set for Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, which had been designed without her input purely based on the text in the book.
On Pottermore, Rowling says, “I first became conscious of [the similarity] when I entered the Number Four Privet Drive that had been built at Leavesden Studios, and found myself in an exact replica of my old house, down to the position of the cupboard under the stairs and the precise location of each room.
“As I had never described my old home to the set designer, director or producer, this was yet another of the unsettling experiences that filming the Potter books has brought me.”
The revelation puts to bed speculation last month that the under-stairs cupboard may have been based on a space in another former childhood home of Rowling’s in Tutshill, Chepstow, which was placed on the market for £399,950 in July (click here to read the story and find out what other similarities were apparent).
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