Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Book launch event

Lucy (my other half, you can find her incredible work on Instagram @lucy_oram.art ) and myself were involved in the creation and display of the entirety of Waterstones Canterbury’s decoration for the event. This along with the actual coordination and running of the event. Our involvement began extremely close to the event itself as the arrangements for it hadn’t been entirely laid out and it began to cause us concern. This being said there were ideas in place that Lucy and myself didn’t feel lived up to the often lofty hopes of the ‘Potter-heads’ that would surely come along. We went to the management of Waterstones with an idea that i had come up with around the set up of a mini Diagon Alley, a popular setting from the Harry Potter book series. With this in place and a swift and positive approval from the management team, we set to work. We briefly discussed the sort of things we needed and we thought about the use of a range of signs, all inspired by the shops in Diagon Alley. This took up the majority of the work but we also had to think about the many different interesting things we could do.

So we set up shop on the disused top floor of the Canterbury shop and began frantically making the various plaques and signs to create our ground floor mini Diagon Alley. The signs would be made from cardboard from the shops deliveries, along with acrylic paint that we already had from previous display work carried out in the shop. This decided we began painting each piece of card that we had to create a base for the design to be painted over the top. During the time it took the first batch to dry, we sat down and discussed the actual stalls we wanted to have set up with interactive sections and interesting elements. We threw around a lot of ideas and after much deliberation we decided upon having a sweet shop (Honey Dukes), a Herbology stand, a divination table as well as a Flourish and Blotts book shop table. We set about gaining the necessary table dressings and items for convincing renditions on these different stalls. After painting the front of a few of the now dry signs, this brought us to the end of the first full day on the task, with two more ahead we decided to take a rest.

At the beginning of the second day we ended up having a delayed start as there were meetings happening in our temporary studio. This being the case we left to look for more of what we needed in order to dress the tables, in this instance, some glass effect plastic vases ,plantlife for the herbology table as well as some small china cups for the tea leaf reading divination table. After procuring two leather suitcases as further props we headed back to the ‘studio’ and found the meeting was over so got back to making our shop signs as well as other related signage. I wanted to recreate the chaotic craziness of Diagon Alley and have a really busy ceiling, full of signs with that key style that makes all of Harry Potter stand out, with our own personal twist. After extensive hours spent making numerous other signs we left late the night before the event, ready for the last push on the final day. Before we left we decided to make a list of all the things that we would need to buy the day after for finishing touches, to fully ensure we would not need to leave again, in order to focus solely on the signs left to paint.

On the last day we managed to arrange all that we had bought and painted in the areas they would be in and spent the remainder of the time co-ordinating how the event would run, along with buying a whole host of sweets for the Honey Dukes stall. This included a last minute wonderful creation from Lucy which involved her drawing frogs onto the top of some chocolate digestive biscuits to create our very own ‘Chocolate Frogs’. With the help of one of our colleagues Rachel, we had a whole range of chocolate frogs ready in time to make last minute adjustments to the signs and start taking them downstairs to start the overhaul of the ground floor in order to prepare for the crowd we were expecting.

With little more than ten minutes to spare, Lucy and I finished hanging the signs and setting out the stalls, to have a crowd of people turn up outside the shop all in fancy dress. We ran upstairs to put on our own costumes, Myself as Hagrid the giant and Lucy as Bellatrix Lestrange. Running in a long coat and high heels, individually, we just made it onto the newly created ground floor Diagon Alley, to co-ordinate and hone in the team to make sure everything would run smoothly when we let the flock of Harry Potter fans in through the front door. When the time came I was the one to walk slowly to the front door with my lantern and keys to a very excited crowd of people and begin the most frantic hour of my life so far. We had people taking photographs left right and centre, asking if the signs would be for sale after the event as well as constant compliments on the decoration. In between scurrying around in between owls and broomstick wielding children myself and Lucy managed to share looks of appreciation as all of our hard work had paid off almost instantly and there were so many smiling faces to back that up.

After the three hundred strong crowd dispersed and many photographs were taken with appreciative customers. We closed the doors just after half past twelve that night and shared a shattered group hug with successful feelings spread throughout and numerous mentions of our hard work. This was one of the most fantastic things to be a part of and showed me a great deal about organisation and execution of events as well as great ways to make convincing shop signs. Overall it was a resounding success that ended up receiving letters of appreciation from customers, with our decorative work being held extremely highly. Having this experience has been incredible and I will not hesitate to take any similar opportunity that comes my way. The only thing that I probably will not miss is the having to tidy an entire shop at one o’clock in the morning after having worked solidly for three days.