So for my birthday this year, I planned a trip to see the Harry Potter studios finally – you can read all about that on my Harry Potter-focused blog.

But of course, I didn’t go to London for just one day – We had 4 nights there. Sadly, our plane was delayed because of a storm, and when we arrived it was to find that the Winter Wonderland we wanted to visit was closed due to the bad weather conditions.

Luckily, monday morning dawned bright and early (and dry), which meant we were back on track to do some exploring before the big day tuesday. And the exploring took us to Goldhawk Road, which I recently learned is actually a fabric district! It’s around 20 fabric shops, all of them door to door in a small area on Goldhawk Road. It was quite overwhelming, actually. There was so much fabric, all kinds of fabric – shiny, glittery fabrics, velvets, brocades, silks – really, all kinds. I saw many fabrics I never saw before there.

Most of the shops were very overstuffed. To the point of don’t go there if you’re claustophobic. But if you dug around, there were nice ones to find. I didn’t buy that much, because the prices were honestly not super impressive – but my impression was that if you’re good at haggling, you can get decent prices. 

Some shops were just kind of odd – like, one of them had some weird chanting going on, and was so full, we could barely reach the end. Which is probably why we didn’t notice it continued around a corner. But when we entered the next shop (which had a different name on the outside), we heard the same chanting and it took us a good 5 minutes to figure out that it was the same shop and not just the same radio station. And there was a huge basement with just as much fabric. 

I think this is a great place to go to if you have a specific thing you’re looking for – which I did, I bought some velvet that I am hoping to use for a new cosplay. I also bought some fun fabric that I didn’t know that I need – a purple/pink glittery gradient. I’ll have to see what to use it for. 

To get to these shop, basically, you just take the Underground to Goldhawk Road, get off – and then you’re there, more or less. I’ve added a map below, together with some videos of the shops