Sting stung on Grade I pad

Once more our roving eye turns towards celebs in the property market - and lands on rock star Sting. It seems the yoga-loving one, poor lamb, is engulfed in red tape after buying a Grade I listed house in Westminster last summer.

Sting is fast discovering the problems of owning a Grade I listed house in Westminster. Last summer, he paid Labour MP Shaun Woodward and his heiress wife, Camilla Sainsbury, £5.7 million, through FPDSavills, for his rambling 8,000sq ft Queen Anne mansion overlooking St James's Park. "Sting can't believe the red-tape involved in making even the tiniest alteration to this historic building," says a friend. "He and Trudie had hoped to have moved in by now."

At Christmas, author and adventuress Alexandra Tolstoy sets off from her Oxfordshire home on a house-buying expedition to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. "It's one of the most beautiful and unspoilt parts of the world," she tells me. "You can buy a property in an acre or two of land for about $5,000 [£2,900] and spend double that doing it up. Tashkent is only about five hours away by air from Britain." Alexandra, a distant cousin of War and Peace author, Leo Tolstoy, runs trekking expeditions there with husband, Shamil, a Tartar horseman.

Actress Britt Ekland, the Sixties' precursor to Patsy Kensit, has sold her Victorian cottage in a secluded Chelsea cul-de-sac. Her three-bedroom Victorian property, with a tiny patio, close to actress Susan Hampshire's, made £690,000 through May & Co. The diminutive Swedish star of films such as The Man With The Golden Gun and Get Carter, was once married to actor Peter Sellers.

The artistic community of Deal in Kent, has a new resident: former BBC newsreader Jan Leeming. She has bought a bargain £140,000 flat through local agent Bright & Bright in a 19th century building near the sea. The two-bedroom property, close to Henry VIII's Tudor-rose shaped Deal Castle, is a contrast to her former home in nearby Finglesham, which she recently sold for an estimated £385,000. New neighbours of the five-times-married star include crime novelist Frances Fyfield, actor Neil Stuke and writer Mary Kenny.

Influence-peddlers and spin doctors wishing to live closer to the centre of power should consider a neo-classical house behind Westminster Abbey for sale at £2.5 million though Hathaways. This recently refurbished four-bedroom property was built in 1929 by Rear Admiral Sir Tufton Beamish, the former Tory MP for Lewes. As well as a billiard room, there is a large drawing room with a south-facing terrace, useful for entertaining cabinet ministers, MPs and civil servants.