When the makers of the third Harry Potter film were looking for a location to film scenes in the Leaky Cauldron pub and the bustling Diagon Alley, they chose Borough Market in South London, an area of narrow, winding, cobbled streets with a step-back-in-time feel.

In truth, Borough Market has undergone a magical transformation in barely a decade. An area that thrived for the wrong reasons under the first Queen Elizabeth headed rapidly downhill for a few centuries but is now flourishing again for the right reasons.

Borough Market, which lies barely 100 yards south of the Thames and is a ten-minute walk from London Bridge, was once notorious for brigands and footpads. Marshalsea debtors’ prison was there, bear-baiting was the local sport, and the “Bishop of Winchester’s Geese”, a band of local prostitutes, provided all the entertainment a man could want for a couple of groats.

From such a high point, the charm of the area slipped. It became filled with warehouses in the days when goods were unloaded from boats in the heart of London but then in time those decayed. The Bishop of Winchester’s palace, which had stood by the Thames, crumbled. Borough became a no-go area, and so it remained until David Fennel arrived.

Fennel, a property developer who owns a vast apartment in the oldest surviving Thames-side warehouse, stumbled upon Borough in 1992. “It was just a wholesale market then. Tourists didn’t go near it, and there was tumbleweed blowing around the streets,” he said. “I pushed against a rotten door, which collapsed, and I could suddenly see the Thames. I thought it would be a great place to own a flat.”

In those days, the Jubilee Line hadn’t arrived and no one could see the point of building on such a derelict site. But Fennel, helped by the decision of Southwark council to regenerate the area now known as Bankside, saw potential and raised money privately. He has since built about 30 developments south of the Thames, helped along because the Government was dragging its feet. “Every time they put back the Jubilee Line extension by six months it gave us another opportunity to pick up a bargain,” he said.

The market turned from a scabby wholesalers’ bearpit to a thoroughly middle-class farmers’ market in 1998. Shakespeare’s Globe, five minutes’ walk away, opened in 1997; Tate Modern came in 2000. The site of the kitchens of the Bishop’s palace is now an Italian restaurant.

“Its success has caused a few problems with getting out of your front door of an afternoon,” Fennel says. But he likes the bustle — he can throw open the farmhouse-style windows of his first-floor flat and look down Stoney Street towards the market. To the left is a replica of the Golden Hinde, Sir Francis Drake’s ship, to the right the Clink Museum. It is a perfect location to watch the world go by.

“First the artists come in, then the trendies, then the middle classes and then eventually the toffs will arrive. It’s like Notting Hill used to be,” Fennel said.

He prefers the view from the back of the flat, however. Fennel rightly describes this as a “riverside, not a river-view, flat”. The Thames is beneath your nose and when the tide is low you can shin down a ladder to the riverbank. “It’s always changing, there’s always something going on,” he said of the view from his bedroom. “If you can’t sleep, you can look out and see the city reflected in the river. It’s beautiful.”

Fennel bought Winchester Wharf, which dates from 1820, from Borough Market in the late 1990s. It was the first time the building had changed hands since 1859.

The main structure of the building stayed intact, charmingly so, from the chunky, rough-cut brick walls to the wood beams and columns, but Fennel created a large open space, excellent for parties, around a frosted-glass central core behind which is storage and the communal lift that takes you to his office below or the flat above. Essentially this is 2,250 sq ft of open-plan living, the only fixed doors being on the bathrooms, although partitions, one decorated by a cartoon of a noisy cityscape, can swing back to cover the two bedrooms and divide the living space into two large reception rooms, in one of which Fennel has a full-size table-tennis table.

A big attraction is the master bathroom, which has a large round steel tub and a shower head the best part of two feet in diameter.

Fennel is a man who needs to be near water, and he admits that he will miss his flat in such a great location, half an hour’s walk along the Thames from Covent Garden, but it is time to move on and take on another waterside rescue mission, a 90ft barge in need of total renovation. “They were the HGVs of their day, but were sailed by a man, a boy and a dog,” Fennel said. “

Containerisation killed them off, as it killed Borough Market, but I’m going to try to rescue one.”



The flat is for sale for £1.65 million through Cluttons: 020-7407 3669

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