In the show Jo says: “This is really the room where I finished Philosopher’s Stone, here. This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat.”

Jo explains further: “I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I’d made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, ‘Well, I want to write,’ and I wrote the book and, ‘What is the worst that can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal. It’s really back to the wall time here.’”

As she walks around her old home she is amazed to find Harry Potter books in what was her bedroom, but is now occupied by new residents.

“Oh look, Harry Potter books! Now that is really freaky,” she tells the cameras.

“If I’d known that 10 years on I’d come back with a film crew and there’d be my published books on someone else’s bookcase in this room - this is really incredible to me.”

"For years now I've felt that if it all disappeared - and some days I do feel like, 'is it real?' - then this is where I'd come back to. This would be my base line, I'd be back in Leith."

"Because it's such a well-worn part of my story now, it's a big yawn to hear how I wrote it, as though it was all some kind of publicity stunt for a year. But it was my life and it was very hard and I didn't know that there was going to be this fairytale resolution, and coming back here is just full of ghosts," she said.

She says: "In some ways it would have been a neater ending to kill him but I felt it would have been a betrayal.


"So Harry came back from war and he tried to build a better world, I suppose, corny as it sounds."