Inside our Harry Potter wedding, with a Hedwig, ‘flying’ car and Gryffindor robes
Amy Fieldhouse-Downes, 40, is a content manager and lives in Leeds with husband Luke, 36, a teacher, and their sons Harry, seven, and James, four. The couple spent £15,000 on a magical Harry Potter-themed wedding in July 2021, inspired by their shared love of the books.
Arriving at Scarborough registry office for our marriage ceremony in a light blue Ford Anglia 105E, my dad and I could have driven straight off the set of a Harry Potter movie.
The driver was dressed in a replica Harry Potter Gryffindor robe complete with scarlet lining and a wand pocket, while inside the car were many knick-knacks as nods to Harry Potter, including a fluffy Hedwig, a Gryffindor scarf and a broomstick tied to the back.
In fact, the only difference between my wedding wheels and the one from JK Rowling’s books and films is that this one didn’t fly. Even the date we got married – 31 July – was significant as that’s Harry Potter’s birthday.
Looking back, it was inevitable that our wedding would be interwoven with the theme of our favourite books, movies and characters even though we didn’t plan for it to be that way originally.
A shared love of Harry Potter
Luke and I had our first date in a local bar nine years ago having been set up by my best friend and his – who are married to one another and knew we were both Harry Potter fanatics. There, we talked for hours about our adoration of everything to do with JK Rowling's magical franchise. Not your average first date chatter, you may think, but we hit it off immediately.
We’d actually met briefly a few years earlier at a bonfire party and I remember Luke pretending that a sparkler was a wand and trying to cast spells, which I thought was hilarious, but I wasn’t single at the time.
The only difference between my wedding car and the one from JK Rowling’s books and films is that ours didn’t fly.
It was my sister, who’s five years younger than me, who introduced me to Harry Potter when the first film came out, after which I began devouring the books. By the time the final one – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – was released in July 2007 I was so hooked that she and I queued at midnight at Waterstones in Cambridge where we lived at the time, dressed in Harry Potter costumes – homemade cloaks – to get our hands on an early copy each.
A magical proposal
For me, the real magic is the way JK Rowling intertwined the different stories, giving nods to earlier books in each one, which made you feel like you’d been part of this special journey with her characters. I’ve always loved the messaging in her stories too, which is essentially about following your moral compass and doing the right thing.
Luke popped the question on the Harry Potter studio tour with a diamond ring encased in a box designed as a golden snitch
You won’t be surprised that one of my favourite places is the Warner Bros Harry Potter Studio Tour in London. I’ve been 10 times now, four of them with Luke. It was during our third visit together in February 2018 – by when we’d had our sons – that something very special happened.
We were in the final room of the tour, where a beautiful scale model of the Hogwarts Castle is revealed, when Luke dropped to one knee and proposed as Hogwarts Hymn ( the song I love most from the Harry Potter soundtrack) played in the background.
The song added to the emotion of the experience, so I was already feeling choked even before Luke popped the question with a diamond ring encased in a box designed as a golden snitch. The third and smallest ball used in a game of quidditch in Harry Potter, it's a gold-coloured sphere with silver wings.
The wedding day: Harry Potter's birthday
We planned to get married in July 2020 but, of course, the pandemic put paid to that. But when we decided to move our wedding forward by exactly a year, the date for that Saturday was 31 July – being Harry Potter’s birthday, it seemed like fate.
In fact, had we got married when we’d first planned to, we probably wouldn’t have had a Harry Potter wedding at all, so it was doubly fateful. At that time, we had the idea in our heads that we’d have a massive, traditional fairytale wedding in Scarborough, the seaside town we most adore.
Planning a unique wedding
Postponing the occasion gave us time to think about what we really wanted – which was actually something completely different! During summer 2019, Luke and I had been guests at five weddings and although each one was unique in its own way, we learned which elements we loved and which we didn’t, so by the time lockdown was upon us in March 2020 we’d already begun to question whether we really wanted a big shebang.
Very quickly, we reasoned that what would be more personal and fitting was a wedding which reflected our own interests and personalities, not just a copy of what everyone else had done before us.
We wanted a wedding that was personal, that would reflect our own interests and personalities
This led us to decide that we wanted our family to be together in the morning for the civil ceremony at Scarborough registry office, followed by lunch at our favourite fish ‘n chip shop in the town. Our evening celebrations would be aboard a historic boat that’s moored on the pier, with the freedom to decorate it however we chose.
That’s when I suggested that we should incorporate a Harry Potter theme but didn’t want it to be as over-the-top as wearing fancy dress. Instead, it subtly permeated every part of our big day. I’d had the idea in my head since we first started thinking about our wedding and Luke was very much on board.
Finding inspiration
Having settled on our theme and pored over Pinterest for ideas, we roped in our family and friends who spent the next year making roses for the buttonholes and my bouquet from pages of Harry Potter books which I bought cheaply in charity shops, as well as bunting to decorate the boat.
Someone on Etsy made personalised wands for us – Luke popped his in his suit pocket while mine was incorporated into my bouquet.
Someone on Etsy made personalised wands for us – Luke popped his in his suit pocket while mine was incorporated into my bouquet. My sparkly wedding pumps were ordered from a company in America who embroidered them with Harry Potter’s glasses as well as his iconic lightning bolt scar, a legacy of when Voldemort tried to murder him as an infant. The shoes cut my feet to pieces but I was adamant I was wearing them.
Inscribed in our wedding rings is the word ‘always’, a reference to the moment when the Harry Potter character Severus Snape revealed he had loved another character, Lily Potter, all along.
My mum made our Harry Potter-inspired wedding cake, complete with a beautiful snitch, as well as a doe and stag topper which represents a huge part of the love story between the characters James and Lily, Harry Potter’s parents.
After the ceremony, we got to fly two owls in the grounds of the register office – owls feature so heavily in Harry Potter books and movies – and we created a fabulous sweet shop on the boat for our guests stocked with Harry Potter-themed goodies including chocolate frogs, Dumbledore’s favourite sherbet lemons, and countless jars filled with treats such as liquorice wands and chocolate coins.
Ordinarily when I mention Harry Potter to family and friends I’m met with a collective rolling of the eyes, but on our wedding day they loved all the references to our favourite fictional character and very much appreciated not being asked to attend in fancy dress!
So often I hear people refer to their own wedding as being magical, but ours really was sprinkled with an extra special feeling of wizardry thanks to our Harry Potter theme.
See Amy's work at Contentplanningwizard.com
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