If you were in any doubt about how well comedy pays, Steve Coogan’s sprawling new home in East Sussex should set the record straight. The man behind Alan Partridge paid £2.45 million for the eight-bedroom manor house in Ovingdean, just outside of Brighton.

Called Ovingdean Grange, the 16th-century Tudor pile is one of the oldest properties in East Sussex and so steeped in history it comes with its own Wikipedia entry – as well as a billiard room, cinema room, walled gardens and two-thirds of an acre of land.

Pre-Coogan, the house had another famous inhabitant: the Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who wrote a book in the late 18th-century and named it after the property. Ainsworth documented how the future King Charles II hid from Cromwell’s forces in the chimney-breast of the master bedroom – although this hasn’t been corroborated yet by historians.

Coogan – who has recently endeared himself to the British public by demolishing the former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan on Newsnight – is not moving far from his old home where he had lived for ten years: a six-bed Regency townhouse in Wilbury Road, Hove, with swimming pool in the garden, close to Chris Eubank’s home and not far from his friends Zoe Ball and Norman Cook. Coogan lived at this address for ten years before moving – including a 16-month spell with his now ex-wife, Caroline Hickman.

He has previously owned a flat in Notting Hill and shared a house in Belsize Park with his first partner, solicitor, Anna Cole – who moved down to Brighton with their daughter, which is why Coogan is Brighton based.

He has been quick off the mark to get to know his new neighbours, inviting members of an Ovingdean amateur dramatics group to his home for a few drinks after their open-air play in the local village. It was a fitting setting: the play was a dramatisation of Ainsworth’s Ovingdean Grange. It is quite possible that within the play’s audience will be Julie Cowell – who also lives in the village – whose son is none other than Simon.

Last night we were at a book launch for an extraordinary title and one of the most fascinating tomes to be written about property in recent years.

Thousands have been published about ‘homes’ but few stand the test of time and most are fairly lightweight – from vague ‘how to’ interiors guides to ‘stating the obvious’ investment handbooks.

One common strand among those that do endure is their author’s passionate, single-minded dedication to a subject, one example being the architectural books published over the years by ex-Country Life editor Clive Aslet.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with his work is House Histories, the first book to be published by Melanie Backe-Hansen.

She carefully picks her way through 90 addresses and thoroughly researches their histories and consequently her book is a fascinating record of our ordinary and extraordinary addresses that, for a variety of reasons (including political intrigue, murder, celebrity connections and extraordinary events), can claim to be famous and sometimes, infamous.

Backe-Hansen makes a unique connection to the history of Britain told in its bricks, mortar, cobble and plaster.

The astonishing bit is her detailed research among thousands of tax records, census returns, electoral registers, street directories, deeds, archives and other documents and the hard hours at ‘the archive’ are easy to spot in the book.

Do we have a favourite? We’ve had the book for a couple of hours but one already sticks out – Hotham Hall in Putney, London. It’s a standard-issue, red brick, early 20^th century village hall with several historical connections.

Both Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden spoke at rallies hosted at the hall during the 1930s but it was also the venue for one of the first concerts by The Rolling Stones and The Who. The property is now a clutch of luxury apartments.

House Histories is for sale at £16.99 by The History Press, in association with estate agent Chesterton Humberts.

It hasn’t been a good year so far for Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World. He had to resign from his job advising David Cameron in January after the first hacking scandal broke and was then arrested last week as the police investigation widened.

But from a property perspective, he’s done very nicely. He bought his five-bedroom family home in Forest Hill, South London for £589,000 ten years ago and it is now worth over £1.2m – so he’s made about £60,000 a year in equity over the past decade.

When police came to search his house last week while he was questioned at Forest Hill police station, officers would have no doubt admired the long, wide and verdant road on which are to be found the area’s most expensive and largest detached Victorian and Edwardian houses.

The local postcode (SE23) has been undergoing a renaissance over the past decade and the name spells out its appeal. At the highest point in London it really is a hill – with some of the best views of the city – and although calling it a forest would be a stretch, it is very green, something that has brought young families to the area in droves.

Although it is no Dulwich village – which is Forest Hill’s smarter neighbour where properties on its sought-after College Road go for double the price – it is catching up, and is a good alternative for anyone like Coulson who can’t afford Dulwich.

Boutiques and increasingly upmarket shops have started to pop up in Forest Hill and that purveyor of wealth, the whole foods and organic cafe, has arrived in the form of The Provender.

‘The transport links are excellent – it only takes 10-12 minutes to get into London Bridge’, says local estate agent Kinleigh Folkard and Hayward which says that such easy access paired with the space, a growing retail centre and excellent schools accounts for the areas increasing house prices. Perfect for the Coulsons who have two children, though both are educated privately.

Forest Hill has a quiet celebrity following – Singer Kate Bush, actor Timothy Spall and interior designer Linda Barker all live here.

So you’ve got a supercar in your garage. Maybe it’s a Ferrari, perhaps an Aston Martin and if you are a fully fledged Clarksonite, possibly a Bugatti Veyron.

It’s a massive asset sitting in your garage slowly gathering dust and depreciating in value. So if cash flow is a problem in your life and you don’t have the £50,000 required to put a deposit down on your yearned-for holiday home in somewhere like Sandbanks, for example, then a specialist and upmarket pawnbroker has set up shop to help out.

Supercars lined the street in London's Mayfair

London based firm TGS suggests that, rather than sell your beloved lean machine to finance the deal, why not just pawn it? More sensitive souls might call it asset-based short term lending, but TGS says it’s just a way to get your hands on cash quickly without involving a bank.

The credit crunch has seen business expand rapidly for the firm as banks have become reluctant to lend on property transactions, even when their clients are wealthy.

Paul Zimbler, who runs TGS and has 14 shops across the capital, says he spotted this gap in the lending market by mistake. Customers had been coming to him for ‘title’ lending – which is when the borrower keeps the car but takes out a small, short-term loan against its value – but notice clients looking to borrow larger sums.

Paul says he then offered to keep the car in return for a larger loan. TGS will lend up to 70% of a vehicle’s value and loans can be for up to seven months – although typically they last one to three.

Recent deals Paul says he’s completed include £60,000 leant against an Aston Martin, £40,000 against a Porsche 911 and £100,000 against a new Bentley, all of which were used to finance property purchases. Most people use the service to pay unexpected bridging loans, finance the costs of moving home including stamp duty, or put down deposits.

In January this year Beatles drummer Ringo Starr got behind a campaign to prevent Liverpool City Council bulldozing 400 houses in the city’s central zone, close to Princes Park and Toxteth and better known as the ‘Welsh Streets’ area. Starr lived at 9, Madryn Street, a Victorian terraced house, until he was four years old and was photographed earlier this year outside the property giving his trade mark ‘peace’ sign.

There was a great furore over such a tangible piece of Beatles history being destroyed and at the 11th hour in April this year Communities Minister Eric Pickles stepped in to save the street, winning it a year-long reprieve.

But what few people know is that another of Ringo Starr’s former residences, this time in North London, has bitten the dust without so much as a whimper. But instead of a council bent on urban regeneration, Ringo’s old house (pictured below during the 1970s) on Compton Avenue (pictured today, bottom) near Kenwood Park in north London has fallen to the grand aspirations of a Russian family.

PrimeLocation Blog has been told that the unnamed Russian bought at first a single home on the gated cul-de-sac and then soon afterward a second, Roundhill, which used to be Starr’s home from 1969 to 1973 while married to first wife Maureen. They moved there after a stint at Brookfields in Elstead, Surrey, which he bought off Peter Sellers (and who had bought it off Hollywood actor Spencer Tracy). The village today is the home of on-off couple Cheryl and Ashley Cole.

Brookfields still exists but sadly, Roundhill does not. The property on Compton Avenue has already been demolished and locals say building work on a Russian style mega mansion is already well under way – another piece of Beatles bricks and mortar to disappear.

But Ringo still owns plenty of homes to keep Beatles fans happy. As well as a large country house near Cranleigh in Surrey he has a town house in Walton Street in Chelsea and a home in Los Angeles.

The extraordinary story of a country manor near Okehampton in West Devon surfaced recently after its new owners discovered a secret wall to the side of its main hall. And it was no small affair; as you can see from the picture below, it’s basically a mammoth sash window-cum-partition that slides into the floor, in much the same way a car window retracts into the bodywork.

The house in question is Combe Trenchard, a 116-acre Edwardian estate designed by Walter Sarel and influenced by Gertrude Jekyll, bought by forty somethings Sarah (pictured below) and Philip Marsh in 2007.

Photo Credit: Barry Gomer/Rex Features

Their first find for the the couple was a formal garden hidden by half a century of shrubbery and tree growth but it wasn’t until holding a party one day that the secret wall was discovered. The wall dividing a small living room and the house’s main hall appeared to be normal but a large hook on the wall below the ceiling and floorboards either side that could be lifted up easily captured their guest’s attention. After much heaving the wall was lifted off its mooring and promptly slipped under the ground.

The purpose of the wall (in the early 20th century) was to allow family members to sit in the smaller lounge while unmarried men and women entertained each other in the main hall, albeit under the beady eye of a chaperone.

Photo Credit: Barry Gomer/Rex Features

The house, which was built in 1906 in the Arts and Crafts style, was a living museum when the Marshes bought it. Owned by the same reclusive couple for half a century, it was untouched by modern life and needed both its electrics and plumbing upgrading – not to mention the “ramshackle” garden.

Combe Trenchard is not for sale – at the moment, anyway – but there is a rich vein of property on the market across the UK that does harbour architectural secrets like the the Marsh’s. First up is a house in Hamilton Terrace, St John’s Wood in London which has a secret wine cellar while the mansion that comes with The Blair Estate in Dalry, Ayrshire has a secret door linking the lounge and dining room together, Cluedo-style.

There’s another large country house for sale near Godalming with a secret garden, and perhaps best of all is Wentworth House, for sale at £5.95m in Richmond, Surrey with a secret passage that runs from the house, under the garden and down to the river. It’s closed off by could easily be openend, the agent says.

And lastly, make of what you will of the secret passage within Frensham Manor, a Grade II listed manor house in Rolvenden, near Cranbrook in Kent. Its secret passageway leads from the second bedroom past the house’s great chimney and vaulted dining room to the attached annexe accommodation. Whatever was that for?

Central London’s hot property market has for some time been floating above the rest of country, untroubled by the financial difficulties faced by other parts. Prices dipped only marginally during the worst of the credit crunch and, as soon as 2010 dawned, raced off again as demand outstripped supply.

The evidence? Prime property prices in London were up 1.3% during April this year, our latest index shows, well ahead of anywhere else in the UK.

If you are wondering why London is cocking a snoop so dramatically at the recession then look no further than the mass of foreigners who continue to buy-up properties in Knightsbridge (pictured, above), Mayfair, Kensington and – to a certain extent – Chelsea.

More proof? Agent Knight Frank this week revealed that 60% of new-build homes in central London (over the past six months) were bought by Asians, driven by the favourable exchange rate and London’s growing reputation as the world’s must-have address for anyone with high net worth. And remember that London has a more diverse business environment (from banking to digital tech) than other capital cities and remains a hub for high-quality higher education establishments, many of which are either in or near London.

So where do these Asians hail from? Knight Frank says buyers from Hong Kong made up 24% of all foreign buyers, Singaporeans (12%) and mainland Chinese (10%). And to give an idea of the money involved, Asians have spent £120m on London property (bought through Knight Frank) over the past two months. And that’s just one agent.

But signs of an improving British economy are feeding through, sort of. Buyers are creeping back into central London, says Marylebone property consultant Simon Hedley of Druce, who has found that home-grown buyers in his area of expertise, the W1 postcode, are increasing in number. He reveals that beteween 60% and 70% of his clients are now British, up rom 40% during the hardest months of the recession.

But central London is not the only place in the world of the significantly affluent where house prices are rising fast. A recent survey of the world’s house prices revealed that on average they were up by 2.8% during the final quarter of 2010 lead by Asia, where property values rose by 7.5% over the past 12 months along with the Middle East (5.3%) and South America (3.8%).

And it’s no wonder Hong Kong buyers are thick on the ground here – Hong Kong house prices were up by 20.1% over the past year, alarming enough to drive the city state’s government to make moves to dampen down price inflation.

If you have ever watched the TV show Location, Location, Location and wondered what sort of homes the duo who present it own, then we can reveal all – including both of them having a taste for a double life.

Kirstie Allsopp – the bubbly foil to the more considered and softley-spoken Phil Spencer – has been talking to a local newspaper in her adopted county of Devon about her property portfolio, as many people like to call multiple home ownership now.

The Honourable Kirstie Allsopp (she is daughter of the sixth Baron Hindlip) has three homes which she’s amassed with the help of millionaire property developer partner Ben Anderson.

Her first and best known is a six-bedroom holiday cottage in Welcombe, North Devon, bought for £300,000 in 2008 with her partner and his business partner William Montagu Wentworth-Stanley.

It’s a holiday home-cum investment property and is available to rent for £2,000 a week plus it’s also featured in her recent TV show Kirstie’s Homemade Home during which she did up the dilapidated cottage for £23,000 and learned 15 crafts along the way, including iron mongery. The property is also used by Ben’s former wife Theresa for holidays too.

But the couple’s main home is in a highly desirable slice of London between Notting Hill and Holland Park. It’s a two-storey apartment within a modern block and is where the couple are based most of the time. Their two children, Bay Atlas and Oscar Hercules, go to school in the area.

But their largest property is Broadhembury House in the picture-perfect, thatch and whitewash village of Broadhembury near Honiton in Devon.

It, like Kirstie, has titled connections and was built by Julius Drewe in the early 19th century – a man who believed he was descended from aristocratic Norman blood.

And so to Phil. He is only one house behind Kirstie, we can reveal. His main family home is a Victorian semi in Wandsworth, London to be found in a group of roads known as the ‘toast rack’ for the shape they make on the London A-Z. He also has a holiday home in Kent which, in the past, he has said he struggles to afford but loves as it’s only an hour and 45 minutes from the ‘hamster wheel’ of London.

This year’s competition to find Britain’s Beach Hut of the Year is in full swing and there’s no event that smells more of British fair play, marmalade, soft wet sand and warm sand, we think.

In a world dominated by smart phone mania, text-mad teenagers, ultra-modern penthouses and angular contemporary art the cosy and quirky world of seaside beach huts is a rare reminder of a Britain that’s largely disappeared. So anything that celebrates that is up our street, or should be we say down our promenade.

Picture of last year's Beach Hut of the Year competition, Margot Charlton, outside her hut in Sandilands, Lincolnshire.

Beach huts are, as the competition notes, as much part of our coastal heritage as candy rock, piers and groynes and appeal to many people’s desire to eschew over-the-top extravagance. The vast majority are no more than glorified cupboards, with room only for two people to dodge a strong onshore wind while sipping their tea.

But a small proportion are nearly houses and occasionally come with plumbing, water, electricity – although most can’t be lived in year round. According to the Beach Hut of the Year competition, there are 23,000 to be found in the UK with the most expensive on Mudeford sandbank in Dorset, where occasionally some of the 350 huts there go for £120,000.

But even less glamorous ones go for sizeable sums. There’s a very colourful one for sale at the moment on Bexhill-on-Sea’s promenade for £27,500, on of some 100 for sale on PrimeLocation.com at the moment.

The competition is looking for entries and categories include the ‘best beach hut story’ so if you have a beach hut get weaving – you’re sand-blown abode could win the right to a commemorative blue plaque and a £250 prize.

PrimeLocation recently paid a visit to Rosedale Abbey in North Yorkshire and was surprised to discover a hornet’s nest of unhappy home owners rather than the genteel moorland community one might expect.

Publican sought? The Milburn Arms in Rosedale Abbey within the North York Moors.

Tempers are getting frayed over proposals to turn a defunct pub into a boarding house for wayward youth from nearby Grimsby. But why would this interest a wider audience?

Firstly, The Milburn Arms, as it was known until closing in 2008, is owned by multimillionaire and Tory party donor David Ross, best known as founder of mobile phone firm Carphone Warehouse. But what’s really stirring up local passions is their fight for a place to gather, something that touches a raw nerve in the thousands of small communities across the UK facing reduced services.  For example, last year 1,300 pubs closed down and this year 1,000 village stores face closure as the recession bites.

The Milburn Arms story started when Ross, flush with the millions he made from Carphone Warehouse, bought the Rosedale Estate, a shooting estate that once belonged to one of the North East’s richest mining and shipping families, the Milburns – and after which the pub is named.

The pub is part of the estate but the business had been going badly for its landlord, who had paid £100,000 for it in 1983 and coughed up £27,500 a year in rent, Land Registry enquiries reveal.

David Ross pictured with (from LtoR) former wife Shelly, David and Samantha Camera at the 2006 Conservative Party Summer Party in London.

In the 2008 The Milburn Arms closed down and this is when the fun started. The estbalishment, which is really a hotel, pub and restaurant rolled into one, was then mooted by Ross as an extension of the Havelock Academy, a school in Grimsby he helps fund. The hotel would have then become the residential block for children from the academy attending outward-bound style courses in the surrounding North York Moors.

Locals, including celebrity glass blower Gillies Jones, believe Ross isn’t keen to find another landlord for the pub while a change of use application for an educational establishment is prepared for the local council – something that Ross, who is said to have a ‘personal interest’ in The Milburn Arms, denies.

In the meantime, one of Yorkshire’s most famous villages favoured by walkers, mountain bikers and tourists has only two small tea shops, no pub and, ironically, PrimeLocation noticed while there, very little mobile phone coverage.