And there are plenty of caf?that offer the blissful relief of a cup of tea and a sit down.Main market 8am-6.30pm Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday 8am-1pm, Thursday Portobello Road and Goldborne Road, London W10. The setting’s perfect too – framed by the types of London terraces that make those “Hugh Grant Woz Ere” holiday snaps. Nearest station: Liverpool Street (Central, Circle, Hammersmith & City, and Metropolitan Lines, and national rail services)Portobello Food, fashion, antique furniture – it’s all here on the long stretch north from Notting Hill to the Westway and beyond. You may want to take in Brick Lane’s equally fashionable offerings (until 2pm Sunday) and the spectacle of Columbia Road flower market (Sunday, 8am-1pm), while you’re in these parts.Main market open 10am-5pm every day but Saturday Commercial Street, London E1 (020-7247 8556). The guy serving us took quite a shine to our glamorous Celia, but as for what exactly he said, well it was so suggestive he made that van driver seem like a nun.Tours of Borough Market with Celia Brooks Brown cost £55 and include lunch (020-8376 2847; celiabrooksbrown ) SpitalfieldsGroovy furniture, oh-so-Shoreditch T-shirts and organic food and veg – the ever-sprawling City may be encroaching on its territory, but what remains of the old vaulted East End landmark is still enough reason to visit. Without her I wouldn’t have found my food-market memory, of the blackberry tart and apple pie I bought It wasn’t just the puddings that were so memorable. Borough may not be the cheapest place to buy food, but even here, £55 buys a lot of bacon.Still, I have to thank Celia.

Even if you don’t know the market already, you may still want to explore it by yourself. It’s an odd proposition: a vegetarian born in Colorado leading you round a London market where my personal highlight is the bacon at the Ginger Pig. She speaks a little Spanish, for visitors who may get lost in translation.But anyone can wander the market, strike up conversation and sample cheeses, olives and cider. Celia is good company, and can guarantee you won’t miss any highlights. You’ll get to chat a little more to the stallholders and you can certainly taste more than other visitors. If you’re in town to blow the budget, you could write it off as a holiday treat, like the special bottle of wine at dinner, seats at the opera and the trip down Bond Street. Then it’s a walk west to Zakudia, a restaurant with a view over the river, for a buffet lunch of Borough Market fare, which is included in the tour price, though drinks are extra.Which brings me to the only reservation about the tour – it costs £55.

At the Cool Chile Co we taste fierce spice pastes and chat with another of Celia’s pals about Green and Red, a new Mexican bar in Bethnal Green, where they serve Guadalajaran food. And, of course, there are olives, oils and bizarre Italian fruits.Next Celia will take you to a 45-minute wine-tasting at Bedale’s, before a half-hour stop off at Brindisa, Spanish specialists, to nibble the exquisite Iberico jamon and membrillo (quince jelly) with tetilla (a cheese named after its resemblance to a certain part of the female anatomy). Even better, he knows Celia, and since I’m with her, he opens up to us both about hunting bans, his ancestors, cows and, would you believe, even cheese.If you need something to ward off the winter chill, try a pint of something warm and spicy at the New Forest Cider stall. But if you want a taste from further afield, Celia can lead you to the Parmesan Cheese Company, whose huge wheels come from cows that breathe the pure air and graze the untarnished pasture in the Apennine mountains. When we get to HS Bourne, purveyor of “choice Cheshire cheese”, we find Mr Bourne on the phone, organising a repair back at the creamery where he makes what he sells. Yes, it’s small by the standards of Barcelona’s immense Mercat de la Boqueria, but it’s the variety and the contrast of the traditional and cosmopolitan that set Borough apart. Beneath a brace of blue rinses, private tasting notes are exchanged on preserves and chutneys.In all, 5,000 people visit the market every Friday, and double that number on Saturdays, and if you come into the market proper and see the stalls, you’ll understand why.

City boys eat lunch at the new restaurant Roast, looking out over the hubbub below. Couriers push their bikes in one hand and hold treats for the weekend in the other. There are around 100 casual traders and a dozen or so permanent stalls, as well as delis, patisseries and so on scattered around the perimeter. It still exists now, with traders setting up at 2am while clubbers, drunks and streetlife walk by, but it was the idea of Borough’s trustees, Hodgson included, to open a daytime market for the public that really created the fashionable, thoroughly middle-class attraction as most people now think of it.Of course, Borough Market is so embedded in post-Jamie Oliver Britain that it’s hard to imagine it was ever under threat. At the end of the 1990s, under pressure from the supermarkets and their direct distribution deals, the wholesale fruit and vegetable market was struggling.

But both can claim to be very much a part of the market, especially since Randolph Hodgson – whose Montgomery cheddar is among Celia’s favourites – was among the saviours of this market. As the distinctive aroma of the shop’s activity becomes apparent, it strikes me that neither this cheese shop – excellent as it is – nor the previous coffee shop, are things that Borough alone possesses. It’s an irritatingly good excuse, but if it happens to you, Celia can always step in.On to Neal’s Yard Dairy. Usually you’ll get a talk from AJ here, too, but today she’s in Brazil visiting another coffee producer. This is the sort of place a first-time visitor could easily skip – it’s only when you’re inside, and order, say, a filtered Baixadao coffee from the Leal Carneiro family in Brazil (coffee nerds welcome) that you understand how different this is from Starbucks.