J K ROWLING has made an emotional return to the cramped Edinburgh flat where she wrote the first book in the Harry Potter series.

The author, who has notched up almost 400m book sales, broke down in tears as she recalled the hardship she endured while living there as a single mother with her baby daughter Jessica.

The £130,000 two-bedroom flat in Leith – the district of the city that was the setting for Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting – is only a few miles from Rowling’s £1.5m Georgian mansion in the smart Merchiston district. But she had not returned there since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997.

She moved to the property in South Lorne Place in 1994 after a friend offered to pay the £600 deposit. After her separation from first husband Jorge Arantes, a Portuguese journalist, she had briefly lived in a bedsit.

Rowling, who was unemployed and living on benefits, wrote much of the novel on a manual typewriter in the flat and also in nearby cafes where she fled to escape the cold.

Nursing a single cup of coffee because she could not afford more, Rowling waited until Jessica fell asleep in her pram before snatching a few minutes to write passages of the book that would go on to sell more than 100m copies worldwide.

The 42-year-old was overcome with emotion while visiting the flat as part of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, J K Rowling: A Year in the Life, which will be broadcast on ITV1 next Sunday.

“This is where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat,” she said. “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 back-to-the-wall time here.”

While living in Leith, Rowling was harassed by yobs who threw stones at her daughter’s bedroom window and was exposed to the grinding poverty and drug addiction portrayed in Trainspotting. On one occasion a thief broke in while she was asleep and on another a drunk tried to force open her front door.

As she walked around her former home, Rowling was astonished to discover copies of Harry Potter books in what was her bedroom. “Now that is really freaky,” she said.

“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 . . . is incredible to me.”

Rowling revealed that she wished she could have known that her decision to write the Harry Potter books was going to have such a “fairytale resolution” during the toughest times at the flat.

That fairytale ending is a Potter industry worth £7 billion across the globe.

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