preview

An Integral Location Within The Harry Potter Series By Jk Rowling

Decent Essays

Platform 9 ¾, an integral location within the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling, provides the focus for the final third of this chapter. Initially, I analyse the site as a barrier to the tourist, before considering its nature as a collectively read text, and finally I discuss the platform as a disregarded location within the Harry Potter series. Located within the concourse of King 's Cross station, a space which sees a footfall of approximately 48 million individuals per year (Network Rail, n.d.), Platform 9 ¾ is one of the most visible literary spaces within the United Kingdom, with replicas of the platform existing internationally in sites as diverse as The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park in Orlando, Florida through to the public railway station in Wellington, New Zealand. Driven by the perpetual success of the Harry Potter series across a range of diverse media, these worldwide representations of the platform offer tourists the opportunity to experience a simulacrum of the platform at King 's Cross, a site embodied with a primacy of location. This primacy, led through the primary evidence of the texts and the visual authority providing by the locations used in the film, seems set to continue upon the imminent cinematic release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) and the two part play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016). Both the play and film continue the visual coding established by the films; Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Get Access