Hogsmeade Station 🚂 HP Location Guide

[14] Privet Drive

"A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen."

—Description of the street at night.

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INTRODUCTION:

Privet Drive is a suburban street in Little Whinging, which is located in the county of Surrey, near London in the southeast of England. The neighbourhood consists of a number of boring, boxy houses with gardens at the front and back.

RESIDENTS:

The Dursleys lived on this street, in Number Four. Neighbours included 3 Privet Drive and 11 Privet Drive. The type of people who live here seem to be rich, snobbish and extremely nosy; Harry Potter once noted that they were the type who thought "scruffiness ought to be punishable by law". The street has its own postal delivery service and at least one (Number Four) gets the Daily Mail newspaper.

NOTES FROM THE ADMINS:

•In Latin, privet means "it deprives us." When pronounced "pree-'vyet," it means "hi" in Russian, although this is probably a coincidence.

•According to Pottermore, Rowling chose the word privet from a privet bush, a hedge that isolates suburban houses. She mentions that she liked the link to suburbia and isolation, which connected well with the Dursley's desire to be normal and away from wizards.

•In the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, every car featured on the street is the same model, the Vauxhall Vectra Estate, which creates an anachronism. This model was made sometime after 1999, which is long after the film was set, in 1991.

•In the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Arabella Figg is shown to live in this street, despite canonically she lives on Wisteria Walk.

•For production of the film adaptation of the first book, an actual urban location (Picket Post Close, Winkfield, Bracknell) was chosen to double for Privet Drive. When this proved impractical for further films, a section of Privet Drive was constructed on the back lot at Leavesden Studios. As of August 2011, an aerial view of this set could be viewed via Google Maps.