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Warner Bros has announced it is to open a 21,000 sq ft Harry Potter store on Oxford Street, one of London’s busiest retail thoroughfares.
The studio’s Global Experiences wing says the two-floor shop will be an “interactive retail experience” including recreations of the franchise’s most recognisable locations, as well as “photo moments” and exclusive merchandise.
Karl Durrant of Warners’ worldwide retail division said that the store, which is set to open in the autumn, will act as a bridge between the series’ bricks-and-mortar attractions and its “shopping opportunities”.
“It will give fans an exciting new way to experience this magical world in the city that features so prominently in the stories,” he said.
The store will be located on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, a short walk from the theatre where Potter spin-off stage show The Cursed Child is still running. That show concludes its two-part production on 20 September and will reopen as a one-part production (in line with other productions around the world) on 6 October.
London already has a popular but small Harry Potter shop in Kings Cross station, next to a photo opportunity space where visitors can appear to push a trolley through a brick wall, as Harry does in the books to access Platform 93/4.
Warners’ Leavesden base just outside London also runs Harry Potter studio tours, and there are six Harry Potter theme park attractions at Universal Studios locations worldwide.
Cities that already have major Harry Potter shops include New York, Chicago and Tokyo. Oxford Street already boasts a considerable number of unofficial Harry Potter retail outlets, some of whose business practices recently came under examination.
The official London store, which will probably funnel tourists towards its doors and away from more opportunistic outlets, will open in time for what is predicted to be considerable activity around the 25th anniversary of the release of the first film in the franchise.
Next year also sees the transmission of the first series of HBO’s TV adaptation of JK Rowling’s books, which aims to explore their worlds in more detail than the whistlestop movies.
As of February 2023, the books have sold more than 600m copies worldwide, while the film series is the fourth-highest-grossing in history, making $7.7bn (£5.8bn) at the box office.
