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There is very little of la belle France in Manechez’s life: they don’t get French TV at home and, although she tried to register to get French magazines, the UK postal address was a stumbling block. She misses being au courant a bit, but catches up with the news online, at Yahoo or the Le Monde website. As for socialising, expense and the demands of a young child mean they tend to entertain at home rather than go out for dinner. French food, unsurprisingly, tends to predominate chez Manechez. “I mainly cook stuff my mother used to cook. I don’t particularly like British food and nor does my husband. We like entertaining and eating at home.”

The icing on the cake for an expat like Manechez is that Clemence is one of the state-school intake, not the Lycée, so her education is free. “It’s because we’ve lived in England for a while and registered at the English Consulate,” she explains. “The system is not that fair.”

Yet although English may be a global language, parenting is still strictly national: Manechez is startled at how early English parents put their children to bed. In France, she says, people have dinner with their children every night when they get home from work, at 7 or 8 o’clock, and the children go to bed at 9.

“Most working parents here have a nanny who will do the kids’ dinner and put them to bed. I have friends whose nanny takes care of their children and I don’t want to do that. I want to bath her in the evening and have dinner with her. We think it’s important for her.”

Philippe Belot, another Wix parent, also paints a picture of a pleasant life of dinner parties at home and neighbourly chats in the street. Aged 48, he hails from Paris and works for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He and his wife, Pascale, 43, and children Antoine, 8, and Irene, 5, arrived in London three years ago. Irene is now in the bilingual stream at Wix so that, as Belot puts it, she learns the language of her host country. His wife, an interior designer, found it “surprisingly easy” to get a job here – she was one of the team behind London’s latest hot restaurant, Scott’s in Mayfair. For Belot, the only real downside is the expense. “Life in London is really quite nice,” he says. “I find the English a lot more social than French people. I’d be upset to leave London.”

Ultimately the family would like to return to France, but Belot is convinced that the quality of family life in Clapham, with its terraced houses and the wide open space of the Common, is much higher than in Paris, where he thinks the family would probably be in a fourth floor flat with the nearest greenery a car ride away.

“But,” he adds, “it is a big step for a French person to go abroad. Historically, if you look at how we handled our colonies, it was always extremely difficult to find volunteers to go abroad. I think we had it too good at home.”

Estimates vary as to exactly how many French people live in the UK. The French government puts the figure at 202,000 but concedes it could be 300,000. The Office for National Statistics says it’s 134,000 and that 10,000 French people move here every year, but that’s just the people who have registered and are on the electoral roll. The official ONS French population figure for London and the southeast is 80,000, 60 per cent of the total, but other estimates put it as high as 150,000 and that of the country at large as more than 400,000. What no one disputes is that London is now the seventh biggest French city.

The overall trend is rising sharply: in 2002/3, 5,500 French people in London applied for a national insurance number, according to the Greater London Assembly. Four years later that figure was more than 10,000, making French people the fourth largest nationality to apply (after Poles, Indians and Australians). And they are young: most of those living here are in the 25-34 age group. When asked when they expected to return, 25 per cent said “never”.

Hamid Senni, a young entrepreneur from a town south of Lyons, is unequivocal about why he left. “In the UK you can set up a business in an afternoon. In France it took me nine months.” Senni, 32, speaks five languages and has jobs at BP and Sony Ericsson on his CV. When he briefly contemplated returning to France, the only job he was offered was selling vacuum cleaners door to door. He moved to the UK two years ago to set up his company, Vision Enabler, which helps companies to diversify their workforce. He says he now has a wonderful life, living in a rented flat in fashionable Marylebone and spending his spare cash in restaurants and clubs with an international bunch of friends who share English as a common language.

The France Senni experienced put up hurdles to entrepreneurship at every level, “be it skin colour, university or connections”.Senni, whose parents emigrated to France from Morocco, says that from school onwards he was told that he would never succeed. One teacher told him he should go into the army rather than being an engineer, “Because with the reference I’ll give you, you won’t make it. It’s a dead-end for you.”

“As far as they [the French] were concerned,” says Senni, “the kids of migrants were there to replace their parents when they retired. If your father’s a carpenter, you’re going to be a carpenter. I think my generation were the pioneers who thought, ‘I’m not going to waste my life’ and we left. But now all the young talented people are leaving. France is like the Titanic: it’s a beautiful ship, but it’s going down.”

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