Homes gossip: is Martine "the mistress" ready for marriage?

Former EastEnders star Martine McCutcheon is living in a rented Thameside property in Battersea, where two-bedroom penthouses can cost £700 to £1,000 a week.

Sharing this space is her boyfriend of the past three years, fuzzy-haired chanteur Jack McManus (“he‘s phenomenally talented… a beautiful soul”). The award-winning Dalston-born actress is normally found in the rather less groovy environs of Wimbledon Village where she bought a property in a gated development opposite Wimbledon Common.

Currently publicising her first novel, The Mistress, she recently launched her own lingerie range for Matalan and will shortly star in a BBC radio play opposite Bill Nighy.

After romances with the likes of singer Mick Hucknall, music producer Gareth Cooke and actor Steve John Shepherd, an insider predicts that she and McManus, eight years her junior, will soon be hunting for a property to begin married life.

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While his boutique-hotel empire expands Martin Miller is selling Miller’s Academy, the Westbourne Grove literary club that he founded in 2006 for nearly £2.5 million through Savills.

“I’ve converted the first floor into a two-bedroom flat,” he says. “It’s completely minimalist with the highest-spec sound and light systems.”

Last month the thrice-married boulevardier opened Miller’s at the Anchor, a
14-bedroom hotel at Porlock Weir, Dorset. He already owns Miller’s Residence in Notting Hill and Glencot House in Somerset and has just started “gintelligentsia” master-classes based on his own-brand gin.

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Photo-booth tsar Serge Krasnianski has paid £7.65 million for Chelsea’s most impressive nest of artists’ studios. The rambling property, owned by former Mayfair art-dealer Martin Summers, was first marketed it with adjoining studios last winter at £20 million.

Party-loving Summers then reduced the price to £17 million and subsequently sold the largest studio to exotic Polish artist Malgosia Stepnik for £2.55 million through Aylesford.

“Martin and his wife, Annie, plan to spend most of the year at their amazing new property in Uruguay,” says a friend.

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Today programme terrier John Humphrys has an altruistic attitude when it comes to his newly-built Greek villa in the Peloponnese. “I let it to anyone prepared to make a very large donation to the Kitchen Tables Charity Trust, which I set up,” he says.

“It raises money for tiny charities - ones that tend to be run around people’s kitchen tables in the poorest parts of the world.”

The Cardiff-born French-polisher’s son normally divides his time between homes in Hammersmith and Wales. He recently split from his longtime girlfriend, BBC producer Valerie Sanderson, with whom he has a son, Owen.

His latest squeeze is Observer columnist Catherine Bennett, the former wife of Lord Sackville, whose 17th century ancestral home, Knole in Kent, allegedly has 365 rooms.