The most brilliantly bizarre lockdown projects – from a Harry Potter room to a backyard rollercoaster

Inside a children’s wardrobe, full of colourful dresses, there’s the faint outline of a wizard’s wand shop. Push past the clothes and a magical street comes into view, with a Flourish and Blotts bookshop, an Eyelops Owl Emporium and Ollivander’s. All of the shops, discerning fans will know, are from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. But the Diagon Alley tribute isn’t part of a Warner Bros. studio tour, it’s in six-year-old Ella’s spare room in Berkshire.

While many of us may have used lockdown to plough through episodes of Tiger King or clicking refresh on the Ocado delivery page, Ella’s dad Dylan used the pandemic to unleash his imagination on his own house. He’s part of a collective of exceptional people who have concocted and built epic, and downright peculiar things, which they may never have had the time, concentration, or inclination to do pre-coronavirus. 

Dylan created the whole surprise Harry Potter street from scratch in his home after he was forced to cancel a trip to Disneyland with Ella. The single working dad spent months jotting down ideas and planning the big reveal, and built the entire miniature street in a month and six days, plus 16 nights. “Everyone has ideas all the time,” explains Dylan who is adamant anyone can be as creative as him during lockdown. “Write down your ideas and come back to them".

With the help of his artistic mum (who painted the shop signs) and his friend Rob, whose company works with Shepperton/Pinewood Studios meaning he had high-spec equipment they could use to cut the MDF to size, they worked together to create Berkshire’s wizarding world. "You can do something, no matter how small," he says. 

And it’s not finished yet. Dylan is currently building a shop at the end of the street. “I’ve done the walls and I’m doing the inside,” he says. “It’s toys, sweets and jokes. I’m going to try and make the upstairs bit of it look like a toy shop and then it will turn into the Gryffindor common room.”

The big secret was revealed to Ella during a game of hide and seek. “The the first thing she said was ‘I can see it!’ and [then] “can we keep this here forever?’” Actor Tom Felton who plays Draco Malfoy in the films later posted a message to Ella on social media, making the experience complete. “Welcome to Slytherin Ella,” he said.

Projects like Dylan’s are exactly what the world needs right now; not only are they a distraction from coronavirus but they’ve connected people and spread positivity. “People are scared in these unpredictable times. There’s nothing out there, all the events are cancelled, all the shows and entertainment for kids are gone,” says Farvardin Daliri from Australia, who built an enormous kookaburra bird during lockdown. 

At the height of the pandemic, Daliri’s day job, like many people’s, was reduced to a few meetings and he had plenty of time on his hands. “Against the gloomy environment of the Covid-19 lockdown, and all the stress and the anxiety that comes with it, I decided to make it a laughing bird to compensate for all the negativity,” explains Daliri.

In March, Daliri - from Brisbane - began constructing a four-metre-tall and 11-metre-wide kookaburra that weighs 750kg. It is completely made from steel, aside from its feathery exterior, which is made from bamboo and straw that, when painted, has the appearance of fluffy feathers. The bird even has switches that hook up to Daliri’s car, which make it laugh.

It took the artist four months working flat out in all weathers to complete his monumental project. When he was finished, he wasn’t quite prepared for the reaction. One drive around the block and a video of the bird went viral. “The kookaburra has a contagious effect,” says Daliri. “The bird itself is a unique Australian bird. It gets your attention and makes you smile. It’s irresistible. In a matter of two to three seconds people’s faces change.”

It’s exactly this light relief, a chance to burst the tension bubble, that we are craving, claims Daliri. After soon as post-lockdown travel restrictions lifted in Australia, he went on a joy-spreading journey, stopping at towns spanning 5000 miles, with his mega kookaburra in tow. He visited hundreds of schools, nursing homes, and hospitals, with the sole purpose of brightening people’s moods. 

“I’m overwhelmed and impressed at the universal connection this bird has had. Everyone from all backgrounds goes crazy about it, I think there is a need for it. People want a break,” says Daliri, as he prepares to continue his journey to another town: “I hope is that it’s never going to stop and the kookaburra, born out of the pandemic, will be a positive legacy of Covid-19.” It’s been a personal journey too, “I have this profound feeling of contentment,” he says, “I feel that my life has been worth something.”

That simple feeling of missing normality led two men on opposite sides of the pond to undertake grand projects. Sneakerhead John Clark from Stockport craved having a pint in his local pub, which was not possible during UK lockdown, so he decided to build a boozer in his back garden. Unusual times spawned a curious design as he married two of his greatest loves – Adidas trainers and beer. “I had no intention of making [the bar] an Adidas shoebox until I saw the shape of the designs,” says Clark, who enlisted the help of a local carpenter to build the structure. “As soon as he drew it down, I saw a trainer box.”

Clark has been a keen collector of Adidas trainers for 10 years. “I always liked Adidas trainers as a kid but could never really afford them. As a child growing up in the 1980s, money was always tight”. Now he’s got around 150 pairs of vintage kicks from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, and his giant shoebox bar is a shrine to the brand.

It took around two weeks to build and seven weeks to create the iconic look. “I cut out the logos and individually cut out all the stripes, which took ages – a day per stripe!” says Clark. But the biggest challenge was tracking down the right paint. Big companies like Dulux and Johnsons wouldn’t mix the right colour for a life-sized Adidas shoe box. It was a local company, Paint Master in Hazel Grove, that made the project a breakthrough design. “By sheer fluke, Hazel Grove happens to be the headquarters of Adidas UK. I emailed the paint company and one of their relatives happened to work at Adidas and they were able to get me the actual paint colour reference.” 

Inside the Adidas shoe box Clark has built a traditional pub, complete with a gin shelf, two beer pumps, Sky Sports, and vintage bar furniture. “You can’t shut the pub at 10pm if it’s in your back garden,” jokes Clark on pandemic curfew regulations. In the future, Clark plans to add hydraulics to the design so the lid of the box lifts up.

Meanwhile, on the west coast of America, in Napa, California, where some of the strictest coronavirus restrictions in the country are in place, architecture student Sean LaRochelle decided to build an alpine-themed rollercoaster in his parent’s garden as a distraction from the world.

With a bit of set designing and construction work under his belt, he roped in friends and family to complete the amusement ride, which pays homage to Disney’s Matterhorn Bobsled, the first rollercoaster LaRochelle ever went on as a child.

It was staggering how many people wanted to get involved, he says. “I started calling up friends in Napa and different parts of the country and I was like ‘I don’t know if you’ve got time but we’d love to employ your skill and creativity for this project’. Everyone was going through the same thing we were going through – they were looking for something to do. Even though we weren’t able to get physically close to each other we worked as this cohesive team.”

It took four months to finish the eight-metre tall and 25-metre wide mountain, with 120 metres of track snaking through and around it, plus true-to-life details like a Yeti and waterfall. “As a joke I called it the ‘Trump Stimulus Cheque Coaster’,” laughs LaRochelle. But he actually forked out between $10,000-15,000 (£7,500-11,000) on the project to get it finished. So far, the pandemic has been a really positive experience for the LaRochelle family. “We are going through such a hard time as a global community, but we all came together and defied all the negativity.” 

Although he’s not worked since the beginning of the pandemic, keen recycler, Mark “Stan” Standing, from Blackpool also managed to find positivity in the crisis. He gave the things he’s collected over the years another life, by turning them into an enormous scaly fish. Some 800 CDs were used to build the larger-than-life aquatic creature. “The process took more hours than I could count,” says Stan, who estimates he worked solidly for three weeks for 8-10 hours a day on it, fastening every scale by hand with around thousand pop rivets. “This stuff would otherwise be destined for landfill,” says Stan.

The artist never throws anything away, if he can help it. “Even down to envelopes, I’ve never bought a new envelope in my life,” he says. His fish is for sale – he hopes someone else can enjoy it as much as he enjoyed building it, alternatively he would love to see it hanging in the Sealife Centre in Blackpool as a local piece of art for the community.

As community projects go, the wackiest creation we’ve found so far was used to terrify local residents into taking coronavirus seriously. Sudhakar Yadav, who runs the Sudha Cars Museum in Hyderabad, India, built a movable ‘coronavirus’ blob in the record time of a week, to help spread awareness of the disease. With a giant green frame and prickles, cleverly made out of giant chess pieces, plus a scooter engine that propels the big globular vehicle around the streets of his home town, his coronavirus car can travel up to 25 mph. 

“As Covid is a worldwide problem, I built this car to bring awareness about the dangers of the virus,” he says. “The response was tremendous, as people were peeping through their windows and balconies to get a glimpse of the car during the lockdown.” Local police even used the car as a visual aid, and it certainly made an impact, “people were initially scared to see the car moving around the city, but the message was clear, to keep away from coronavirus”.

Other folks simply created for the love of the craft; Kim Warrick, from Berkshire, spent much of the pandemic building a caravan for his granddaughter Nola. Made using no blueprints or instructions, Warrick made everything from scratch, from the slats and the roof to the walls to the chassis. It has insulation, a custom-made bed, plus bespoke double glazed windows – making it a seriously cozy place for a sleepover. 

Warrick’s wife added the finishing touches, by kitting out the inside with curtains, bedding, and a play stove. “It was a labour of love,” said Warrick, “the more I did the more I wanted to do. It's such a satisfying feeling looking at what you’ve accomplished – and building it, you can see it coming together”.

Warrick was surprised at the overwhelming response he got when it was posted online, it racked up more than 150,000 likes on Facebook alone. “I was amazed at the reaction and the amount of people who wanted me to make them one. People have also got in touch for the blueprints – but there aren’t any, they’re in my head,” says Warrick.

The entire project took more than a month to complete and has already brought the couple so much pleasure. But due to lockdown, their granddaughter Nola hasn’t even seen the finished product yet, so there’s more excitement to come.

Whether it be coronavirus cars or Harry Potter fantasy rooms, ideas can connect us in the bleakest of times, and its seems there’s never been a more rewarding time to get creative.