London, France's sixth biggest city - BBC News
More French people live in London than in Bordeaux, Nantes or Strasbourg and it is now thought to be France's sixth biggest city in terms of population. What is attracting a new generation of young French professionals to the city?
On a wet Friday night in Hackney, a group of young professional women walk into a pub. Laughing about the British weather, they shake their umbrellas, peel off their raincoats and make their way to the bar.
Like many Londoners at the end of a busy working week, they have come to unwind over a few drinks.
But if you move a bit closer, you realise they are all speaking French. They are not tourists, exchange students or off-duty au pairs. They all work in creative industries, have lived in east London quite some time and consider it home.
London has a long-standing French community - but it is no longer confined to the streets around the embassy in South Kensington, where you will find French bookshops, patisseries and pavement cafes patronised by impeccably dressed mothers dropping off their children at the posh Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle.
“Start Quote
End Quote Malika FavreI came to London from Paris straight after graduating from art school, just to have a look - that was seven years ago ”
Today there are French people in every corner of London and their numbers have been growing, with the result that in next week's parliamentary election in France they - along with expats in Scandinavia - will be voting for a candidate to represent them in the National Assembly.
The French consulate in London estimates between 300,000 and 400,000 French citizens live in the British capital - many in London's cutting-edge creative hub, in the East End.
"I came to London from Paris straight after graduating from art school, just to have a look," says Malika Favre. "That was seven years ago and I've no intention of going back."
Malika is much in-demand as an illustrator. Her commissions include a bold, playful design for a new edition of the Kama Sutra, an album cover for a French rock band and artwork for a Californian beachwear company.
Being in London and speaking English gives her access to a wider client base - Malika sees the city as a gateway to globalisation and also relishes freedom from French bureaucracy.
"With a new venture in Paris you always think first of what is going to go wrong. I find the system much easier here - you don't have so many rules and so much paperwork," she tells me.
Marine Schepens, who works for a fashionable advertising agency, says UK companies are more prepared to give young people a chance because it is easier to terminate their contracts than in France.
This fluidity makes employees less risk-averse too.
"I changed careers a year ago but I would have never done that if I was still in France. I'd have thought, 'I'm so lucky to have a job - I must hang on to it.'"
Nadege Alezine, a journalist from Bordeaux, says life in London is not for the faint hearted. She runs a website aimed at the French community called bealondoner.com
"If you want security and nice holidays you stay in France. If you crave adventure and want to get new skills, you come here," she says.
That is not to say she does not miss France. Sipping her drink, she sighs.
"Life in France was easy. You know, good food and wine. I lived near the sea and not far from the ski slopes. And sometimes when London's grey and rainy I think, 'What on earth am I doing here?'"
All the young women I met complained about London's over-priced property. London rents are twice those in Paris.
"In Brick Lane, we had bedbugs and rats," says Malika, "and for the same money I paid for one room, friends back home had their own flats."
Of course, many people living in London have it far worse, but by choosing the East End Malika and her friends are following in the footsteps of her compatriots centuries ago.
The French first came en masse to the East End in the 17th Century. These Huguenots, who had endured years of persecution in France because of their Protestant faith, were offered sanctuary here by King Charles II.
They called their flight Le Refuge - coining the word refugee.
Many settled east of the City of London, where food and housing were cheaper. There are many French street names around nearby Spitalfields Market such as Fournier Street, Fleur de Lys Street and Nantes Passage.
The Huguenots were skilled craftsmen but some feared that they were depriving Londoners of work. A protectionist priest, a certain Dr Welton, called them "the offal of the earth".
Today competition for jobs is intense, especially among the young, and cross-channel migrants are not always welcomed with open arms.
Recently the French consulate commissioned a report called The Forgotten People of St Pancras. It focuses on the young French who arrive in London on a one-way ticket and sometimes find themselves in desperate straits.
The Centre Charles Peguy, a French charity in Shoreditch, helps new arrivals to find work and a place to live.
Cedric Pretat, one of the advisers, says the numbers have shot up this summer.
"Many French people imagine that because of the Olympics, lots of new jobs have been created in London which is not true. But people arrive with this dream."
He adds: "Others are escaping from things in France such as family problems, educational problems and areas like Department 93, because people who live in that part of Paris sometimes have trouble finding a job."
Department 93 is shorthand for Seine Saint Denis, just north of Paris - the French suburb which is home to many French nationals of African origin and a large immigrant population.
To the average French person, it conjures up images of riots, bleak high rises, youth unemployment and racism. It is the most-discriminated-against postcode in France, although ethnic minorities from other suburbs have also had a tough time.
Hamid Senni, a business consultant based in London, was one of eight children born to Moroccan immigrants in the south of France. A well-meaning teacher at his school suggested he change his name to Lionel.
“Start Quote
End Quote Cleo SoazandryIt's like my eyes opened up when I came here - I think the American dream is also present here in the UK”
"Because of your name you will be discriminated against, because of your skin colour, and even the address on your CV can stop you from getting a job," he says.
"As for your skills and competencies - none of that counts in France if you don't fit in the box - so I left," he adds.
Hamid now advises many French companies on how to diversify their workforce and he lectures at Sciences Po, one of the country's most prestigious universities.
But he says that in the early days it was much easier to get someone to pick up the phone, if he called from London than from Paris.
I first met him five years ago when he had just written a book. It was called De la Cite a la City and focused on his journey from a rundown suburban estate (Cité) in Valence to London's booming financial district.
Hamid suspects the success of the far right in the first round of the recent presidential elections, the highest share of the vote ever achieved by the Front National in a nationwide poll, might have pushed more young French people across the channel.
"France is really struggling to create jobs and things have got worse because some people are saying the whites should come first," he says.
Cleo Soazandry, another young French national with African roots, has a mother from Madagascar and a father from Guinea. Her parents met in France where Cleo was born. In her early teens, the family moved from Paris to London.
"I was really pushed by my teachers here," she says. "Suddenly I realised I could actually become somebody here, be ambitious."
Cleo adds that seeing black presenters on television made a deep impression on her as there were virtually none in France at the time.
"It's like my eyes opened up when I came here - I think the American dream is also present here in the UK."
Listen to The French East End on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday, 30 May at 11:00 BST and listen again via the Radio 4 website.
London on top of disease threat - Independent Online
REUTERS
This undated colorised scanning electron micrograph shows a large grouping of Gram-negative Salmonella bacteria.
London – If someone's stomach is churning and cramping after eating a burger or club sandwich from a pop-up vendor at the London Olympics, Brian McCloskey plans to be among the first to hear about it.
As the man in charge of disease surveillance during the Games, he says the greatest risk will be food poisoning from people eating street snacks in warm weather, failing to wash their hands and using the same toilets as millions of others.
But he has a strategy to get ahead of the threat.
McCloskey's Health Protection Agency Olympic co-ordination centre (OCC) will gather data on a daily basis – not only on confirmed cases of diseases such as measles, meningitis, salmonella and flu, but also on the stomach cramps, coughs, headaches and fever symptoms people complain of when they go to walk-in clinics or emergency rooms.
“It's called syndromic surveillance, and it's kind of a speciality of the UK,” McCloskey told Reuters in an interview.
The idea is that as well as waiting for doctors to officially diagnose and report a specific illness up the data chain, a process that may take days, McCloskey's team will get prior warning by assessing symptoms early.
“Most people don't go to a doctor or hospital emergency rooms saying they've got pneumococcal meningitis or measles, they walk in and say they've got diarrhoea and vomiting, or a temperature, a sore throat and a headache,” he explains.
“We record those symptoms, or syndromes, and we analyse the data on a regular basis to look for changes to normal patterns.”
The Olympic and Paralympic Games are set to be one of the largest mass gatherings Britain has handled, with 8 million Olympic and 2 million Paralympic tickets being sold to spectators from all parts of the country and across the world.
More than 10,000 athletes from more than 200 countries will take part in events starting on July 27 with the opening ceremony and then spreading across 34 different venues.
Little surprise then that the Olympics pose significant public health risks and McCloskey is eager to get ahead.
“The main thing is to know what's happening,” he adds. “That's our key job, putting in place the surveillance systems which will tell us whether anything unusual is happening. Then our response will be to see what we can do to control it and reduce the spread.”
With something like flu, for example, McCloskey says syndromic surveillance could give an alert “about two weeks earlier than that normal case reporting systems do.”
“If a new strain of flu were to emerge, or something like SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome), that would be something we'd take very seriously.
“There isn't any evidence of it happening (in previous Olympics), but it's a possibility so it's one of the things we're on the look-out for.”
Mass gatherings, be they sporting events, religious pilgrimages or rock festivals, can be hotbeds of disease. They have even inspired the creation of a whole new academic scientific discipline called “mass gathering medicine”.
The subject was at the heart of a series of papers published recently in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal in which experts warned that conventional concepts of disease spread and crowd control were often inadequate.
“Mass gathering have been associated with death and destruction – catastrophic stampedes, collapse of venues, crowd violence and damage to political and commercial infrastructure,” Ziad Memish, deputy health minister of Saudi Arabia, which each year hosts the haj pilgrimage, wrote in one of the papers.
McCloskey said the haj is a useful gathering to look at and learn from, but he noted many differences between the pilgrimage and the Olympics that are crucial when it comes to disease risk.
“In the haj ... you have 2 million people travelling together, eating together, sleeping in the same tent for anything from six days to two weeks, so there is very close contact for prolonged periods,” he said.
At an Olympics, while the numbers are greater, they are also more spread out and contacts tend to be minimised to a few hours in the middle of the day. Prior Olympics experiences suggests major infections do not happen often.
“We're fairly confident we have the right systems in place to know if anything is happening, and we have the right resources to respond if it does happen,” McCloskey said.
“But the balance of the evidence available to us is that the most likely thing to happen is nothing at all.” – Reuters
Mind the Gap: London's Olympic Games are Falling Down | The Nation - Nation
Upon returning to the United States after two weeks amidst London's pre-Olympic terrain, I have some final thoughts that I hope the International Olympic Committee and the UK's Tory Prime Minister David Cameron take to heart. I also hope that the Olympics lead corporate sponsors, British Petroleum, Dow Chemical, and McDonalds take a timeout from devising the latest cutting edge trends in evil and listen as well. Your games are in trouble. Your games are in trouble because the people who actually have to live in London alongside the Olympiad are mad as hell. And it's only May.
After two weeks of listening to everyone with an opinion about the Olympics – in other words, “everyone”- it's clear the entire affair suffers from Annie Hall Syndrome. At the start of Woody Allen's 1977 classic, Woody talks about the two elderly women at the Catskill resort who complain that the food is terrible while also adding, "And such small portions!" Londoners are annoyed at the inconvenience brought by the Olympics, incensed by the security crackdown... and outraged that there are no tickets available. This is hardly a petty complaint. Corporate partners have gobbled up the seats, leaving the overwhelming majority of the city with their nose pressed up against the glass. In London, where the pubs dot every block and open onto the streets after work in a daily party open to all comers, this comprises a cardinal sin. As Neill, one of many bartenders I encountered said to me, "It's like a big to-do that no one invited us to attend!"
The security crackdown and constant paranoia are discomfiting enough (fears are being disseminated about the Irish. Seriously.) But what singes the locals is the idea that the Olympics are a party that will stick them with the bill: a hangover from hell without the drunken rapture that by all rights should precede it.
All Olympics produce debt like a cow produces methane. But this one happens in the context of a double-dip recession. It happens with round-the-clock U.K. media coverage of the “Euro-panic”, as voters in Greece are threatening to tell Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and the European Union to take their austerity agenda and cram it sideways. The fears of crisis and debt surround even the cheeriest propaganda about the looming Games. The BBC led every broadcast while I was there with these two separate stories. First, "Crisis in Greece" and then with a different anchor, reporters, and even music, "Getting Ready for the Olympics." Nowhere was any discussion that the 2004 Athens Olympics, came in at over 10 times the proposed budget. Those games aggravated the crisis Greece is currently slogging through, with the country's homeless now even squatting in dilapidated, unused Olympic structures. There is scant discussion that these London games could come in at 10 times their proposed 2005 budget as well, causing another "debt crisis" that will be taken from the hides - not to mention the pensions - of the UK's workers. At several events involving trade union workers and bureaucrats, the message was repeated to me over and over: "When the Olympics are over, the gloves will come off.
In other words, faced with the pressures of austerity and recession, Cameron and company are cooling their jets until the Olympics are over and then they will try to do their level best to disembowel the unions and further cut taxes for the wealthy. Why wait until after the Olympics? Because Cameron needs the unions cooperation to make sure that the games come off on time and on schedule. They need to make sure the unions don't take strike action or join the demonstrations planned for July 28th, the first Saturday of the Games. This is why they agreed to sizable bonuses for London’s subway workers. Anything to make sure that the Olympics show London, and more critically David Cameron, in the best possible light.
I have no doubt that all the top sports reporters will write uxoriously about London and all it’s quaint customs, and the cameras will point at only those cheering the events on, waving the Union Jack. But make no mistake: the Olympic Torch is not the most noteworthy thing passed from Greece to London. It's the looming struggle against austerity. David Cameron might want to wait until after the Olympics to "take the gloves off” but he's not the only one willing to go bare knuckles over the future of the UK.
Alexander Wolff, the great journalist from Sports Illustrated is stationed in London and wrote this week, "Every time I come to England I'm struck by how the lowbrow mingles with the high." But in London the "lowbrow" are angry and the "highbrow" are scared. They mingle only in the shared sense that a storm is coming to the British Isles. The summer will be filled with games. But an epic fall awaits.
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