Could anything be more rock’n’roll? Sitting in Graham Gore’s kitchen in Pangbourne, Berkshire, within a guitar’s throw of his indoor swimming pool, I’m hearing about the day Robert Plant dropped by.

“I was mending my son’s car in the garage when a chap in a checked shirt apologised for intruding,” Gore recalls. “He said, ‘Did you know that a group used to be here?’ I said, ‘You mean Led Zeppelin? Why, are you a fan?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was the singer.’”

Gore, 56, who moved into his picturesque boathouse home with his wife, Val, 54, and two sons, Spencer and Ryan, in 1984, has more than 20 years’ worth of similar anecdotes. Between 1967 and 1973, the riverside house was owned by none other than Jimmy Page, the guitarist and founder of Led Zeppelin.

Plant, the band’s front man, called by in 2003 to revisit the birthplace of the band: it was here that Page had decided to split from the Yardbirds, and where he, Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones would meet and prepare for gigs. Gore invited Plant in to relive some memories. “He told me they used to get to the top floor by a rickety old ladder,” he says. “The band practised up there, but they always stopped by 10 o’clock.’

Now, as then, this idyllic stretch of the Thames exerts a soothing influence on its inhabitants. For days on end, the loudest noise is that of the water gurgling through the weir at Whitchurch Lock. Smart white cruisers and gaily painted narrowboats bob at their moorings against a backdrop of lush water meadows. “It was so relaxing that, when we first moved in, I had trouble going to work,” Gore says.

There has been a boathouse on the site since the 19th century, and for many years it was the offices of Hobbs of Henley, the local boat charter firm. In 1959, the property was converted to residential use; in 1967, it was bought by Page for £6,000.

In the guitarist’s day, the ground floor was a wet dock, with habitable accommodation restricted to the first storey. Above was the floor where the band rehearsed. In 1975, Page sold the house for £28,500 to a developer, who converted it into a practical family home with five bedrooms and two bathrooms spread over the two upper floors.

Was the celebrity connection a selling point? “No, not at all,” Gore says. “We weren’t aware of it until the paperwork came through and it said it had been owned by ‘James Patrick Page, musician’. I still didn’t know the name - the neighbours explained it to us.”

The real draw, he says, was waterside living. “I love the water. I’ve followed this river to its source many times - you can walk to where it bubbles out of the ground, a little puddle under a tree. And when I saw the wet dock, I thought ‘indoor swimming pool’.”

Gore, who trained as an aircraft engineer and had his own building firm before retiring in 2003, paid £98,500 for the property. The family was trading a bungalow with a large garden for a house with little outside space, so the the spacious top floor was earmarked for their sons, who were 13 and eight at the time.

Above all, the couple wanted to make the most of their access to the river. Gore rebuilt the rotten timber balcony outside the first-floor sitting room and constructed a patio below, both with enough room for outside entertaining. “Before I did the patio, everyone used to come over and we’d fish from the balcony,” he says.

Fishing became a popular pastime and the family bought a little cruiser for their 40ft mooring so they could venture farther afield in search of perch, carp and pike.

How did Gore feel about going gardenless with two young boys? “The children really didn’t miss the garden,” he says. “They spent time on the water instead. Spencer used to go canoeing over the weir. In many ways, the river was a good substitute - and it’s a view that you don’t have to maintain.”

Gore’s pet project, converting the disused wet dock into a swimming pool and living area, had to wait until 2000, when he had paid off the mortgage. The big wooden boathouse doors were swapped for glass panels, opening up the glorious view and flooding the ground floor with light.

A small kitchen was installed on one side of the old dock and a sitting area on the other. Gore also added two new bedrooms and bathrooms, making the ground floor function as a self-contained apartment.

Knowing that excavating a swimming pool at river level would be a tricky task, he invited several companies to tender for the job. “One local firm said that it couldn’t be done,” he says. “Then I had round the company who did Pete Townshend’s and George Michael’s pools.” The celebrity poolsmiths quoted £33,000. “I thought, ‘I’ll do it myself. How hard can it be?’ ” Over the next five weeks, Gore was perpetually in mucky wellies, shifting black river mud from the wet dock spadeful by spadeful. “It was such hard work, because of the water table. Every time you dug down, it filled up.” He completed the task with the aid of “several heavy-duty pumps”, then installed a new heating system and a dehumidifier to stop the glass doors fogging up in winter.

The conversion was finished in less than a year. By this time, both sons had left home. The couple moved downstairs to redecorate the cavernous upper storeys - and never moved back. They now travel for at least three months each year, so they don’t need all that space. The ground floor now functions as a perfect two-bedroom lock-up-and-leave apartment.

It is decorated with their favourite mementos. Among the exotic Vietnamese carvings and Kashmiri embroideries, bright pink blow-up rings and plastic floating toys announce that a new generation of Gores is enjoying the boathouse. Spencer and Ryan have five girls between them, and the house often echoes with shrieks and splashes.

“The pool is ideal for the grandchildren,” Gore says. “I was going to say that it keeps them quiet, but really it’s very, very noisy.” Like Led Zeppelin before them, however, they pack up before 10.

The Boathouse is for sale for £1.2m; call Graham Gore on 07984 144110 or visit www.thethamesboathouse.com

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