Harrow School

Where it sits. Harrow School occupies most of the summit and slopes of Harrow on the Hill, a 124-metre rise in the London Borough of Harrow, about 16 kilometres north-west of Charing Cross. The hill is an outlier of the London Clay ridge and stands clear of the surrounding suburbs, so the spire of St Mary's Church at the top is visible from central London on a clear day and the view back from the churchyard takes in Wembley, the City towers and, on the right afternoon, the Chilterns. The school is not a single building but a scattering of about thirty across the hill, linked by High Street, Peterborough Road and Football Lane — which is why walking through it feels like walking through a village that happens to be a school.

The story behind it. John Lyon, a local yeoman farmer, obtained a royal charter from Elizabeth I in 1572 to found a free grammar school for the boys of the parish. Teaching began in 1615 in the building now called the Old Schools, and the school grew through the eighteenth century into one of the nine institutions examined by the Clarendon Commission in the 1860s. Its alumni list is heavy with public life: seven British prime ministers including Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston and Winston Churchill, plus Lord Byron, Jawaharlal Nehru, Anthony Trollope and Terence Rattigan. The Victorian expansion produced most of the visible fabric — the Chapel and the Vaughan Library by George Gilbert Scott in the 1850s, the Speech Room of 1877 built as a half-amphitheatre for the annual Speech Day. The straw boater and the school's Harrow football, played on a heavy clay pitch in a form found nowhere else, both survive.

On screen. The Fourth Form Room, the original schoolroom of 1615 inside the Old Schools building, was used for the Charms lesson in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone — the class in which Professor Flitwick teaches Wingardium Leviosa, Hermione corrects Ron's pronunciation, and Seamus Finnigan sets fire to his feather. The room appears again in Chamber of Secrets. It is an extraordinary survival in its own right: a single oak-panelled space with a raised master's chair, benches around the walls, and almost every square centimetre of the panelling carved with the names of pupils going back to the seventeenth century, cut with penknives as a rite of passage. Byron, Peel and Churchill are all up there among the names known as the Giants of Old. The production dressed it with desks and candles but changed the panelling not at all, so what is on screen behind the actors is genuine four-hundred-year-old graffiti — one of the very few Harry Potter interiors where the real surface, rather than a Leavesden reproduction, is what the camera recorded. The school has also supplied locations for The Young Victoria, An Education and numerous period dramas.

What you actually see today. Harrow is a working boarding school of around 830 boys, so access is controlled and unaccompanied wandering through the buildings is not permitted. Public guided tours, run by the school and typically lasting around ninety minutes, cover the Old Schools and Fourth Form Room, the Chapel, the Vaughan Library and the Speech Room, with the route depending on what is in use. Tours must be booked in advance and are concentrated in holidays and at weekends. The surrounding streets are freely walkable at any time: the High Street's Georgian and Victorian frontages, the Old Schools' Tudor-revival facade of 1820 by C. R. Cockerell, and the climb to St Mary's Church, where a flat tomb in the churchyard is traditionally identified as the one Byron lay on as a schoolboy.

Getting there and timing. Harrow-on-the-Hill station, on the Metropolitan line and Chiltern Railways, is a fifteen-minute walk from the summit and about twenty minutes from Baker Street. The climb up Grove Hill or Peterborough Road is steep. Parking on the hill is severely limited and largely residents-only. Term-time weekday afternoons bring boys in boaters moving between houses, which is the school at its most characteristic, but it is also when tours are least likely to run. The Castle and the Hill pubs on the High Street handle lunch, and the churchyard bench at the top is the best free viewpoint in this part of London.