Interesting Facts About Alnwick

For a Northumberland market town of around 8,000 people, Alnwick carries an outsized reputation. It has a castle that has stood for the best part of a thousand years, a second-hand bookshop known around the world, a garden built for deadly plants, and a Shrove Tuesday football match that predates almost every organised sport you can name. Walk through the Market Place and you are treading ground shaped by border wars, Norman barons and Hollywood film crews. Here is a roundup of the facts that make Alnwick worth boasting about.

Alnwick Castle became Hogwarts

Alnwick Castle is the second-largest inhabited castle in England after Windsor, and it has been home to the Percy family since Henry de Percy bought it in 1309. Its earliest stonework dates back to the 11th century, and the first written record of the castle comes from 1138. For most people alive today, though, the castle is best known from the screen: its towers and courtyards stood in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films, and it was here that a young Harry learned to fly a broomstick. The castle has also appeared in Downton Abbey, Blackadder and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Best for: Best for a genuine claim to national fame: the castle where Harry Potter first took flight.

The Keep Calm and Carry On poster was rediscovered here

One of the 20th century's most recognisable pieces of design owes its second life to Alnwick. In 2000, Stuart and Mary Manley of Barter Books found an original Keep Calm and Carry On poster tucked inside a box of books bought at auction. The British government had printed around 2.5 million of them in 1939 to steady public nerves at the outbreak of war, but they were barely used and almost all were pulped. The Manleys framed their copy for the shop, customers began asking for reproductions, and a design motif now found on mugs, T-shirts and greetings cards the world over was reborn in a Northumberland bookshop.

Barter Books fills a Victorian railway station

Barter Books is one of the largest second-hand bookshops in Britain, and it occupies Alnwick's former railway station, an unusually grand building opened in 1887. The station was built on a lavish scale for such a small town precisely because the Dukes of Northumberland lived nearby, and it needed to be fit to receive visiting royalty. Trains stopped running in 1968, and the building sat disused until the Manleys opened their shop in 1991. Today a model railway runs along the tops of the bookshelves, and open fires invite you to start reading before you have even paid.

Best for: Best for a rainy afternoon: open fires, endless shelves and a model train overhead.

A garden designed to be dangerous

The Alnwick Garden, the modern creation of the Duchess of Northumberland, is famous for its tumbling Grand Cascade and its thousands of plants, but its most talked-about corner is the Poison Garden. Kept behind locked black gates, it grows plants capable of killing you, from hemlock and foxglove to deadly nightshade, and visitors are told firmly not to smell, touch or taste anything. Alongside it stands one of the largest wooden treehouses in the world, a vast structure of walkways and turrets among the trees.

Alnwick plays medieval football every Shrove Tuesday

Every Shrove Tuesday the town stages Scoring the Hales, one of the last surviving games of medieval football in England. First recorded in 1762, it is contested between the two parishes of St Michael and St Paul, with teams of roughly 150 players a side. It was once played through the streets of the town; today it takes place on The Pastures, the riverside meadow below the castle, with only a handful of rules and a great deal of enthusiasm.

Best for: Best for a spectacle: a centuries-old ball game with 300 players and almost no rules.

The bottles nobody dares to touch

On Narrowgate stands The Dirty Bottles, an old pub once known as Ye Olde Cross. In its window sits a cluster of grimy old bottles that have not been moved for the best part of three centuries. Legend has it that around 1725 a landlord dropped dead the moment he tried to shift them, and his widow declared them cursed. Whether you believe the tale or not, no one has been willing to test it since, and the bottles remain sealed behind glass, thick with dust.

A town shaped by the Scottish border

Alnwick's grandest medieval survival after the castle is the Bondgate Tower, also called the Hotspur Tower, which still spans the main street. It was built in the 15th century as part of the town walls, raised after decades of cross-border raiding had battered the local economy. Henry VI granted the town the right to charge a tax on goods to pay for stone defences, and the resulting gates were decorated not with civic emblems but with the Percy family's lion crest, an unusual boast of noble power over a market town.

Frequently asked questions

Was Alnwick Castle really used as Hogwarts? Yes. Alnwick Castle stood in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films, including the scene where Harry has his first flying lesson. It has also been used as a location for Downton Abbey, Blackadder and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and runs film-location tours and broomstick training sessions in season.

Where was the Keep Calm and Carry On poster found? An original 1939 copy was rediscovered in 2000 at Barter Books in Alnwick, when owners Stuart and Mary Manley found it inside a box of books bought at auction. They framed it for the shop and began selling reproductions, sparking the global revival of the design.

What is the Poison Garden at The Alnwick Garden? It is a walled section of The Alnwick Garden devoted entirely to poisonous and dangerous plants, kept behind locked gates. Visitors can only enter on a guided tour and are told not to touch or smell any of the plants, which include hemlock, foxglove and deadly nightshade.

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