Page Places: The Pangbourne Boathouse

Pangbourne Boathouse

This house on the Thames River sits in the beautiful village of Pangbourne, outside of London. Originally the home was a boathouse for hiring and maintenance of boats belonging to the firm Hopps of Henley from the 19th century until 1959 when it was transformed into a residential home. Jimmy purchased the house in 1967 for £6,000, using money he had saved up as a working session guitarist. In an interview with Chris Welch for Melody Maker Magazine in 1970, Jimmy described how he acquired the home.

"I bought the house about two and a half years ago when I was in The Yardbirds. There hasn't been much time to decorate, being away in the states so much, but you wouldn't have believed the scene when I moved in. The previous owner had great garlands of plastic flowers everywhere. She even had a barrow in the corner decorated with plastic flowers. It was like a Norseman's funeral when we we threw all the flowers in the river."

In the same article that the above interview was taken from, Chris Welch describes the state of the house while Jimmy was in residence...

Issue of Melody Maker 14 February 1970 Chris Welch Interviews Jimmy Page

Welch: "The Thames flows outside his rear porch, rather fast and muddy in February. Swans and ducks poke about. Cows lurch in the fields on the opposite bank. A large white telescope has pride of place in the living room...Wandering around the interior revealed a surprising number of oddly shaped rooms and passages, and down below the ground floor was a huge room housing the central heating, a dismantled antique bed, considerable quantities of junk and a motor launch bobbing about in an inlet waiting for summer.

Page to Welch: "This is the tub [boat]. It's out of action at the moment, but it has a cassette tape machine. You can cruise down the river, switch off the motor and dig all the sounds. I can't wait for the summer. Once the sun comes out, we all go on the river and every day is a holiday."

Welch: "We continued a tour of the low-ceilinged rooms with sloping floors and muddied piles of valuable paintings, records, model trains, and books. Copies of Man, Myth, and Magic lay around and a huge volume of the works of mystic Aleister Crowley. In one room was a Mutoscope, a hand-cranked seaside peepshow featuring "a gentleman's downfall", involving a lissom lass wearing not unsexy 1926 underwear and a healthy smile. Parts of the house were freezing cold where central heating had not yet been deployed to combat the creeping river air. But all held the warmth of personality - and a welcome return to traditional English eccentricity."

Page to Welch: "We often get friends dropping in. We don't exactly take part in the village life, but it's like the New Renaissance of Berkshire, I suppose. A baronial life in our palatial country retreats. [Jimmy laughs].

The house itself was the location where Page and Plant first got together and became acquainted over records and tea. It was also the place where the full band came together for the first time and hammered out a The Yardbird's take on "Train Kept A Rolling". The rest is as they say history.

At last check the house is on the market and has been since 2003. The current owner, Graham Gore, bought the house in 1984, for £98,500 and was unaware of it's ties to Led Zeppelin or Jimmy Page. In 2003, Gore was surprised by a visitor who came round to look at the house:

Gore: "I was working on my car and this chap walked past with a lovely looking lady, and he looked down the drive and smiled and I looked out and he said, 'I'm sorry to trouble you, do you live here?' I said 'yeah' and he said 'are you aware of a group,' and I said 'yeah, yeah, Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, are you a follower of the band?' And he said 'no, I was actually in the band'. He said he was Robert Plant. I was most embarrassed!"

Care if I have a look around?

The house is still for sale and can be had for the bargain price of £1,100,000, or for us Yanks, $1,720,730. A down right bargain for a piece of riverside property with the added feature of breakfasting in the spot where Led Zeppelin was formed!