It's the Rightmove Roundup with sea views in London, Ibiza, Venice and York!

Alright so some of these sea views are actually a pond. Or a canal. Or just a massive boozy flood.

This week on the Rightmove Roundup we’re looking at incredible homes with a sea view, or in sight of a pond, or a swimming pool, or just a massive flood outside.

Houses beside bodies of water - or bodies in the water - who can say for sure?

ONE: 5 bed Victorian terrace overlooking Hampstead pond £6.75m

If you’ve ever been to Hampstead Heath - and I mean the bit near the overground station of the same name, and South End Green and Daunt Books and the fruit stall that my dog always tries to piss on - and I really do want to apologise to that fruit stall - you have surely gazed across that first pond and imagined living in one of the houses that backs onto it. What an iconic view they must enjoy, curved around that swoosh of a street called South Hill Park.

Well here’s one for sale. Five bedrooms, five floors, done up a bit trendy but still reasonably boring, £6.75m:

Now there is a part of me, and I am not proud of this part - for it is a small, shameful part of my soul - that thinks, you know what, for almost seven million pounds, I would quite like - oh I know it’s greedy, I know it’s wrong - but for almost seven million I would quite like my balcony overlooking that iconic London view not to look like a rusty air raid shelter that’s been pissed on by rutting dogs? But like I say, this is not a part of myself that needs encouragement. Not my best side.

I am still thinking though - and I know, I know it’s rude of me to keep mentioning the price - but I am just wondering if, for almost seven million of my massive Sterling bastards, if I could also expect a safety railing on my balcony that doesn’t look like some wankered students lobbed it there after blowtorching it off a Camden Council bus stop?

Maybe I could have also some lead flashing that hasn’t contracted gangrene? And perhaps some patio chairs that don’t look like they were found in a skip? I know they’re meant to look ‘distressed’ but I think the word we’re looking for is ‘assaulted.’

Anyway I suppose I could forget the balcony and enjoy the view from the garden which has a lawn that is so bright green that - oh God. Please tell me they haven’t taken this little outpost of Hampstead Heath and astroturfed it.

Yes I know fake grass makes life easier and it means you can hoover the garden.

But here’s a news flash for you: life is not supposed to be easy and you are not supposed to hoover the garden.

The only person enjoying the view from this property seems to be a tiger in a child’s bedroom, who is gazing out over all the ponds, at all the wild swimmers with their Daunts tote bags and Redemption Roasters loyalty cards, and wondering which of them she will eat first.

(Yes that’s a female tiger - males have a ruff around their necks.)

She thinks she’ll probably start with the ones wearing leopard print Dryrobes, her brethren in the Panthera genus having been humiliated for long enough. The tiger who came to tea and then thought she’d stay for human pudding.

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TWO: Palace in Dalt Vila, Ibiza Town, the Balearics, €6.9m

For about the same price (alright, £5.9m) you could buy this palace in the upper town in the heart of Ibiza, with a garden and palm trees overlooking the port.

It was built in 1800 and recently renovated: six en suite bedrooms, a master suite with its own private lounge, dressing room and bathroom, a grand salon with reception area, and a kitchen with storage room and pantry.

(In the photo below, it’s the house on the top right with the palm tree garden - I think?)

On the garden level there’s an outdoor kitchen and some stunning views of the Mediterranean at night. And probably a healthy number of global superstar DJs doing gak off your barbecue and saying the season’s really gone downhill, if you like that sort of thing.

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THREE: Naval captain’s seaside house, Brittany, France, €875,000.

My friends Sarah and Tom first spotted this, their dream house in Brittany, when walking past it on their annual trip to the local prawn festival, and now it’s only gone and got itself up for sale. It’s an old captain’s house, right beside the little harbour in Port De Lesconil, where every morning the fishing boats sell their seafood fresh on the quay.

(I first met this couple when Tom was some kind of teenage wunderkind who was hosting incredible live music events in Bristol when he was about 15, but now he’s middle-aged with two kids and attends only prawn festivals.)

As Sarah said “We hadn’t even seen inside it when we first wanted it! Look at this bedroom!” She knows me too well. (Oh and they said I could only write about it on the condition that whoever buys it passes it on to them in ten years, ta.)

And here’s the downstairs rooms, oh lord have mercy:

AND THEN THERE’S THE GARDEN AND THE VIEW

Could any of us justify transporting our lives to the westernmost corner of France? Becoming seafood merchants? Oh yes we could. It is time to pivot to prawn.

FOUR: Georgian riverfront mansion in York, £1m

Cumberland House may seem to be perfectly located; a Georgian mansion right beside the river Ouse that runs through the centre of York. A deeply historic, Grade 1 listed building and the former home of the Duke of Cumberland, in a city that was once the Viking capital of a kingdom called the Danelaw, and the Roman capital of a chunk of England known as Britannia Inferior. Which is frankly a stupendous name and I think we should return to it immediately.

Honestly, why did we have to end up as Great Britain rather than Britannia Inferior? Surely this is when it all started going wrong for us - we’re meant to be self-deprecating ffs. Call us Britannia Inferior again and the EU might let us back in.

However - having been to York a matter of weeks ago, I can tell you it is totally flooded around the bottom of this building, as it is every winter now, a problem partly exacerbated by deforestation on higher Yorkshire moorlands, as well as the land drainage the upland farmers all got into thanks to, erm, financial subsidies from the EU.

Those pubs you see lining the waterfront? In flood times that road is entirely submerged and the pubs are only accessible via wooden gangplanks that the landlords put down in any entrance that can vaguely open.

The Lowther, as seen in the picture above, is the pub I misspent more of my youth in than any other, and during the annual floods we’d enter via the side door and be able to use that bar, while the other half of the pub was under water. It wasn’t a separate room or anything, it was just the other half of the pub. Underwater. While we carried on getting drunk in the bit that was more dry. I mean, it’s only as I come to type this now that that does seem quite - odd?

Anyway, look at Cumberland House! It had a law firm in it back then, I think, and it’s been used as offices for years, but it’s Grade 1 listed which means you can’t modify it much, and rightly so. They want to sell it to make a family home in though. Imagine! And with a view of the water that will start in your very own front hall! For York is a town of sandbags. Oh I’d buy this house of ballrooms in a heartbeat though.

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FIVE: Neoclassical duplex with ten bedrooms in Venice, €4.5m

It’s 2:41 am and I really need to stop typing soon, I was going to show you this mad old bungalow that’s only moments from the sea in Whitstable but nah, this sea cruising is unstoppable, we’re going to Venice now.

VENICE WITH A WILDLY COLOURFUL ROOF GARDEN AND A LIBRARY!

This place is a duplex, as they say, so it fills the top two floors of a neoclassical building and yes there is a lift, and it’s in the Castello area very near the Piazza San Marco, and - here’s your view of the water. What a treat. I must sleep now. I can’t format this thing any more. I love writing this mailout! Subscribe, you cads! xxx