London, France

"Oh, pardon!"
"Avance, chérie"
"Ne t'inquiète pas"

The voices barely impinge on my consciousness, as a group of women move past me on the pavement. I don't even look up from my book, or notice the phrase is not in English, after all I'm in the minority here.

The part of London I spend a lot of time in (waiting for the bus, mostly) has been colonised by a large French community who have made it their own. If you want an authentic baguette, a café crème or a copy of Madame Bovary, it couldn't be simpler - and you can order them all in your own guttural, low-voiced mother tongue too.

In the space between my office and the sandwich shop I pass a French Lycée, a French Middle School, A French cinema, several French bookshops and at least three truly French bakeries and cafes (not the weak replicas that populate so many city high streets).

The older children around here slope to school in jeans and ballet pumps, checked scarves draped around their necks. The pavement outside the Lycee is spattered with countless flattened gobs of chewing gum and pupils stand around, at any time between 8 am and 4 pm, fearlessly smoking high tar cigarettes. There is a greater difference between them and their English counterparts than the simple lack of school uniform would suggest: something about the shoulder blades and thoughts read briefly in glancing eyes.

Even the younger children, unaware of their exile status, have a different air: hair cut into short, glossy bobs, mothers younger and more soignée than the typical English.

It's an unsettling and not unpleasant sensation, feeling out of place in a space you may like to think of as your own. A gentle kind of tourism, to move unnoticed among this alien tribe along Bute Street, to buy pungent Camembert on Thurloe Place and try to pass for French while ordering a baguette on Old Brompton Road.