LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition review

76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition is a LEGO Harry Potter set three years in the waiting – but is it worth withdrawing all your Galleons to acquire?

That’s pretty much the cost of what is effectively an expansion to 2020’s 75978 Diagon Alley, a LEGO Harry Potter set probably most iconic at this point for skipping the wizarding bank. The community has since clamoured for the LEGO Group to complete the shopping street with strong ‘full set sold separately’ vibes, but nobody could have realistically predicted we’d get anything like this.

All Gringotts needed to be was the top half of this set, realising the brilliant white building at a size and scale that could slot next to the rest of 75978 Diagon Alley’s magical establishments. What designers Justin Ramsden and George Gilliatt have delivered instead is something you wouldn’t be surprised to see on an episode of LEGO MASTERS, boxed up and sold in stores.

The consequence is that the price tag has ballooned beyond anything you might have once considered reasonable for LEGO Gringotts. (This set is almost the same price as Diagon Alley all over again.) So the question now becomes: has the LEGO Group’s blind ambition paid off, or is 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition writing Wizarding World cheques its build can’t cash?

--- LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition set details ---

Theme: LEGO Harry Potter Set name: 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition Release date: September 1 (Insiders), September 4 (wide), 2023

Price: £369.99 / $429.99 / €429.99 Pieces: 4,803 Minifigures: 13

LEGO: Order now

--- Where to buy LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition ---

LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition will be available exclusively from LEGO.com and in LEGO Stores from September 1 for LEGO Insiders (and September 4 for everyone else). It will likely show up at a single third-party retailer somewhere down the line, but don’t count on it: 75978 Diagon Alley is still a LEGO.com and LEGO Store-exclusive.

--- LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition build ---

While the composition of 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition might have been surprising at first glance, it starts to make more sense the longer you consider the alternatives. At the end of it all, this set really couldn’t have been anything else.

We’re living in an age where most – but not all – sets are designed to fit a particular budget. (75192 Millennium Falcon was that rare exception to the rule, designed first and then assigned a price tag later.) The quartet of current LEGO Harry Potter direct-to-consumer sets have already established that Wizarding World fans are happy to stretch beyond ‘mid-range’ flagship price points and into top-tier territory: 71043 Hogwarts Castle, 75978 Diagon Alley, 76391 Hogwarts Icons Collectors’ Edition and 76405 Hogwarts Express Collectors’ Edition all hover between £260 and £430, most nearer to the latter than the former. If we are all willing to pay those prices, Gringotts was always going to target a similar bracket.

The good news is that kind of budget blasts the playing field wide open. Here the LEGO Group can give us the ultimate Gringotts in the same way it’s previously given us the ultimate Diagon Alley and the ultimate Hogwarts Express (and even the ultimate Hedwig). That means straddling multiple movies, as 76405 Hogwarts Express Collectors’ Edition did last year; and any set broaching the Deathly Hallows Part 2 – in which most of Gringotts’ action takes place – needs to include the Ukrainian Ironbelly dragon. And what’s the dragon without vaults to protect? What’s the bank without vaults to store Galleons, life-prolonging jewels and endlessly repeating goblets? All roads lead to the same destination: a Gringotts set that combines three separate elements in one cohesive package. But if the concept felt concrete, the execution was never certain.

Think about it: if your brief was to incorporate Gringotts, its vaults and a dragon all in the one set, how would you even begin going about it? When rumours of this set first arose, many of us (read: this writer) fairly assumed the vaults would be boxed in, a la 76252 Batcave – Shadow Box, to give the bank the support it would need to rest on top. It wouldn’t have looked great, but that would have been one of those necessary evils to give us the ultimate Gringotts. The designers clearly disagreed on the ‘necessary’ part. In refusing to compromise on the composition of 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition, they’ve delivered something unparalleled in its ambition, which continues to push boundaries not only for the Harry Potter theme, but for the LEGO Group as a whole.

Did you know, for example, that this is apparently only the second-ever set to raise a traditional baseplate off the ground? (The first being 2003’s 3538 Snowboard Border Cross Race.) That really was a necessity to ensure Gringotts could easily connect with 75978 Diagon Alley, and presents one of the most obvious challenges in bringing this set to life, but the solution is a masterstroke. The bank simply nestles into its gravity-defying – but completely stable – support, which spirals up to the 32x32-stud baseplate. It’s above and beyond any expectations we might have had, and is proof if you need it that some of the best ideas only seem to come from Billund. (These guys are paid to cook up original stuff, but credit where it’s due.)

If the broad strokes are promising, the details are even better. The bank has not been compromised for the vaults or dragon; it’s everything you’d hope for from Gringotts in 2023, built to the same format as 75978 Diagon Alley – which, by the way, means this was always going to be a relatively shallow open-backed building. But it makes smart use of what interior space it does have, and especially within the weird shaping of the on-screen building (which, like many movie sets, doesn’t exactly line up both inside and out).

Putting it together feels like assembling a modular building in all the right ways, and the set appropriately takes its cues from recent entries in that LEGO Icons series by incorporating a second, smaller building. The Magical Menagerie makes for a cute connection point to 75978 Diagon Alley, or a flavour of the street if you don’t own that set – but it also follows a similar pattern to the doughnut shop in 10278 Police Station, or the pizzeria in 10312 Jazz Club, in that it feels a little like an afterthought next to the main event. The tower at the front is a touch juniorised against the detail and texture of Gringotts’ slat walls, while the minifigure line-up somehow omits anyone to actually run the place. The variety of magical creatures is just about okay, too – but the instructions specifically call out the shop as the place Hermione adopted Crookshanks, so their absence is a slight head-scratcher.

To the other side of the bank lies a wall seemingly inspired by Diagon Alley’s layout at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios. It adds in useful connection points to its companion set and also acts as a useful anchor for picking up what’s not a terribly light build – and you will find yourself picking it up plenty to place it on and remove it from its vaulted perch – so it’s perhaps more practical than anything else, but at least the aesthetic is consistent with the bank. We could have probably just about coped without it, mind.

The vaults, meanwhile, are just great. They comprise roughly a third of the build, and their presence gives the entire package proper variety: no matter which order you tackle things in (four instruction booklets open the door to multiple paths to completion), you’re never going to spend your entire time with 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition doing the same thing.

Where the bank recalls putting together a modular building, the vaults are closer to the scenic landscaping of 10316 The Lord of the Rings: Rivendell. Comparisons to that Middle-earth masterpiece are fairer still for the techniques involved here, because it feels like a totally novel process from top to bottom: you’ll build in all directions, slot large structures into one another, and bring it all together with the looping coaster track (which uses simple manual cog mechanisms to halt the mine cart at particular treasuries).

The vaults also boast what we’re singling out as the theme’s greatest-ever play feature – call us reactionary – in Bellatrix’s vault. As you put the model together, you’ll pop a single goblet in there against a rocking trapdoor element, with no immediately apparent purpose. But come the end of the vaults, you’ll see more than a dozen extra goblets spill out of one of the bags… and it all clicks. Feed them into a slot in the wall (here’s one you built earlier), then pull forward the goblet on the wall and watch as the Geminio charm springs to life before your very eyes. Fishing the surplus goblets back out of the vault afterwards is a bit of a pain, but it’s absolutely worth it for the smile it’ll put on your face.

Speaking of smiles: whether you’ve built one LEGO dragon or 100, the Ukrainian Ironbelly is sure to surprise for how its wings can extend and collapse for multiple posing options. That feature might exist on other LEGO dragons – this writer hasn’t built every single one to know – but it feels novel here regardless, and transforms what could have been a perfunctory beast into another high note of the ultimate LEGO Gringotts.

Across concept, design and execution, from dragon to bank to vaults, 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition hits nearly all the right notes. But not literally all.

If you’ve pored over the official images or just scrolled through the photos in this review, you probably know what we’re getting at: GRINGOT TS. The two stickers used for the bank’s main signage leave an unfortunate gap no matter how closely you position them to the edge of the sloping bricks. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t totally avoidable: all the design team had to do (if it really couldn’t print these hugely important graphics, which immediately draw the eye) was remove the white border around one side of the sticker and pull the text right up to the edge.

As is, that signage will leave a sour note long after you’ve finished admiring the brazen majesty of everything else here. We can only recommend taking a pair of scissors to the stickers with utmost care for best results, but that shouldn’t ever be a necessity in a £370 set. Ultimately, it isn’t enough to completely hamper 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition – because just look at everything else – but it’s also impossible to ignore. Just saying.

--- LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition characters ---

76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition includes a total of 13 minifigures, covering pretty much every character fundamental to the location across both Harry Potter books and movies. It draws on the Philosopher’s Stone (and the journey to Vault 713) with young Harry and Hagrid, then pivots right to the other end of the franchise for the trio’s grand robbery of Bellatrix’s vault.

Dragomir Despard and Bellatrix Lestrange are stand-outs – Bella finally gets a printed dress, though loses 76415 The Battle of Hogwarts’ dual-moulded arms – and both minifigures include scene-specific face prints and alternate hairpieces for after Ron and Hermione crash through the Thief’s Downfall waterfall. That’s the kind of premium attention to detail you’d hope for in a set of this price, and one that Harry Potter can’t always deliver on in the same way as, say, Star Wars.

76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition also leans into the novels to a degree by including a Death Eater, which is surely a nod to Travers, who only appears in the book of the Deathly Hallows. Plenty of named and unnamed Goblins round out the ranks, along with two security guards, which are mostly set dressing. Again, it’s a shame that attention to minifigure décor didn’t carry through to the Magical Menagerie: just one more character would have been the icing on this line-up.

--- LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition price ---

Did a LEGO Gringotts set need to be £370? Nope. Are we glad it is? Well, sort of. £370 is obviously a lot of money to pay for a LEGO set, even in the modern era of sets reaching twice that price – these are still highly-considered purchases for most of us – but cranking up the budget has brought 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition’s wild aspirations to life.

Those less interested in the vaults (and don’t count them out until you’ve at least seen the whole model built up in person, if you get the chance) would probably have been happy to pay, oh, £230 just for the bank and dragon (easily what they would have come in at). And there’s certainly something to be said for LEGO Harry Potter remembering that mid-range audience exists – the cheapest Wizarding World D2C is still 76391 Hogwarts Icons Collectors’ Edition, at £259.99 / $299.99 / €299.99 – but in hindsight, this was not the set to cater to that demographic. Save up for it, and you won’t be disappointed.

Except for those Gringotts Bank stickers, because. You know. £370…

--- LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition pictures ---

--- LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition pros and cons ---

The very best LEGO sets take concepts that ought to be obvious and push them far and beyond any of our initial expectations. Which is to say: they are not predictable. And nobody could ever call 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition predictable, because it has indeed pushed far beyond what most of us could reasonably have expected from a follow-up to 75978 Diagon Alley. That reference to LEGO MASTERS up top wasn’t a throwaway comment.

Yes, it means you’re looking at a serious investment here – the full Diagon Alley setup now costs a staggering £780 – and yes, there will still be plenty of people who would just like to buy the bank itself, thanks very much. But don’t discount the vaults: they literally and figuratively elevate 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition, to the point that it’s basically the best LEGO Harry Potter set since 71043 Hogwarts Castle left us spellbound all the way back in 2018. Start saving up those Knuts, Sickles and Galleons now.

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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--- Alternatives to LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition ---

True alternatives to 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition are hard to find. 75978 Diagon Alley is less an alternative and more a must-have companion, while the other large LEGO Harry Potter sets all move in different directions – a microscale castle, an enormous train, a series of buildable objects.

If you’re in the market for a showstopper of any flavour or colour, you could do worse than turning to the likes of 10316 The Lord of the Rings: Rivendell – which does across a horizontal plane what Gringotts achieves vertically – or even 10303 Loop Coaster, which is just as huge (and to a degree, impractical) and also incorporates plenty of coaster track.

--- LEGO Harry Potter 76417 Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition FAQs ---