French toast their London life

In 1940 Chomont Wilson, then 20, waited five days as a French soldier at Dunkirk before one evening the German guns fell silent: "I said they must have stopped for dinner. We went down to the beach. I finished up in the sea and was picked up by a warship. I remember the captain calling out, 'Sit down Frogs, have something to eat.'

"We were sent to White City. I went up to one of the officers and said, 'How long are we going to be here?' He said, 'Why?' I said, 'As far as I'm concerned, we shouldn't stop and give the Germans any time.'

"I just walked away and thought sod it and I went in and said to my colleagues and friends, 'I'm going to join the British Army.' I signed on, I got a King's shilling and from there they sent me to Watford."

But before Watford, and active service in Egypt and Italy, Mr Wilson found himself bound to London forever: "I walked from White City right up to Tottenham Court Road, there used to be a place called the Astoria. I couldn't believe it, the girls were just grabbing you. I got married with a Cockney girl and that was my lot. I didn't want to go back to France any more. She was beautiful and gorgeous."

After the war Mr Wilson, who lives in Willesden, set up a business importing food from France. Last Monday he was one of the standard bearers in the ceremony held at the statue of General de Gaulle in Carlton Gardens, just off the Mall, to commemorate the radio broadcast on 18 June 1940 when the General appealed to his compatriots to fight on: "La France a perdu une bataille! Mais la France n'a pas perdu la guerre!" (France has lost a battle but not the war.)

Marcelle Adamson, who as a young Frenchwoman did immensely dangerous work for two years with the Resistance in France, was one of the few veterans to mark the occasion. The wartime generation is now small, but the French presence in London is growing by the day, with the United Kingdom home to the second largest expatriate French population after the United States.

In the past six years London has become an astonishingly fashionable destination for the French. Philippe Durand explained why a year ago he decided to retire from Provence to Kensington: "First because I knew and loved Great Britain. I like the quietness and the fair play of British people. My second reason is my daughter at the age of 19 couldn't speak a single word of English after studying it for 10 years.

"We're living in Kensington because she's going to the French Lyc?e there and we wanted to be as close as possible, even if it costs a bit more in Kensington than in Chiswick. Living in London costs a lot of money. I owned and managed a supermarket near Avignon. I sold it after 25 years of really hard business, that was the reason I could afford to live in London. In the 50 weeks we've been here, we've had maybe 40 visitors from France, and next week three different families are coming. When they get here they say, 'Oh! So the weather is not so bad! We thought it is raining every day.' "

Jo'lle Garriaud-Maylam came to London about 15 years ago, when it was very rare to hear French spoken. She said: "When you heard French spoken in a cafe, you gave your card. It's really amazing - now you'll hear French everywhere." Mrs Garriaud-Maylam married an Englishman and lives in Kensington. She said: "It's true the British are so wonderful, they're so respectful of other people's privacy, there's definitely a politeness that is very endearing. It's so much nicer living here now than 15 years ago. When I arrived the food was often atrocious."