Take my neighbour, Paul Clement from Ipswich. Within the past few months, he and his wife and three young children have moved to the village of Bach, close to the Lot valley. He makes a weekly commute by Ryanair to Ipswich, where the family used to live, and where he still works in insurance a few days a week. Clement says that he is delighted with his family's decision. "It's early days yet, but when you add everything up, moving to France makes sense," he says. "It's a better way of life, it's cheaper, the schools are good, the food is excellent, the air is wonderful. And the local tax costs in one year less than the Ipswich council tax does in one month." Soon, he hopes he'll be able to work remotely from his French home all week, and stop his weekly flights to the UK.
Flight 072 touches down and the stress engendered by crowded Stansted airport visibly dissipates. Shoulders un-hunch, movements become slower. The British expatriates, including Paul Clement, peel off to their French homes in cars that they have waiting at the airport car park. Parking at Stansted's short-stay car park has cost me £18 a day; I will later pay the only working machine in a bank of three £36 for two days' parking. At Carcassonne airport, parking costs just over £25 a month.
Carcassonne and the Languedoc region, from the coast and Spanish border to the foothills of the Pyrenees, has increasingly become a magnet for the British in recent years. Peter Hornby, an IT consultant who runs a website on the Languedoc from his home near Nïmes, has seen British home-buyers pour in since the low-cost airlines came here in the late 1990s. "In the last couple of years it's gone crazy," he says. "The new generation of incomers has changed the whole demography of the region."
France's earlier wave of British migrants tended to conform to a journey that Hornby characterises as "a boat and a day's drive": hence the Dordogne became a big British expatriate destination. Now, significant clusters have formed within driving distance of airport towns such as Carcassonne and Perpignan.
The magazine Le Point calls the small town of Mirepoix "the new St Tropez of the English". Here, prices have leapt since the Anglo influx began in earnest a few years ago. Some local villages are 80% English. In the lovely wooden medieval square, I find several British people browsing in the shops, drinking coffee in the cafes for €1.10 or 75p a cup, and eating four-course lunches for E10 or £6.85. They're distinguishable by their fairer skin, outdoor leisure wear, and the fact that they seem to walk at a more languid tempo than the local French population. Less to do, perhaps. And more to spend. For French prices are, in nearly all cases, lower. I breakfasted on a croissant and coffee - a snack that costs just over £3 at my local cafe. Here it cost the equivalent of £1.40. Then there were those houses to consider, and I found myself lingering over the details of a farmhouse clinging to one of the Pyrenean foothills for €155,000, a little over £106,000. In the boot of my Renault Twingo was a half-case of wine — six bottles for €27 (£18.50) — bought directly from the chambre d'hôte I stayed in outside Fanjeaux, where my hosts Nadine and Norbert Micouleau were occupied with this year's vendage, the grape harvest.
But the difference between Britain and France did not simply lie in cost comparisons. When I bought my son a drinking mug in a souvenir shop, the assistant behind the counter spent several minutes wrapping it, expertly curling the ribbon with a pair of scissors before sealing it with a decorative sticker. Mirepoix's pace seemed to be driven by communitarian ideals rather than the search for profit.
Except, perhaps, in the offices of its estate agents. There are several in town: three alone in the tiny Rue Vigarosy. On the main square, Sandrine Calvet of Immo' Sud estate agents brings out a sheaf of cuttings: articles from French newspapers about the phenomenon of the British influx. "Most of the buyers are about 55 years old, although there are some younger families," says Calvet. "Typically, they sell their houses in England and buy here. Some are retired or almost retired. Some work as builders: electricians, carpenters. A lot make gites for the holiday market. Most are here indefinitely." Calvet is happy, as any estate agent would be in a bull market. "It is good for everybody," she shrugs. "Houses worth €70,000 five years ago are now double. The French are making money. The British have a business mentality and always want to gain something from their houses." Don't locals struggle to get on the housing market? "Prices are going up all over France," she retorts. "There are French people buying here too, including Parisians."
I drive back to Carcassonne through a hilly landscape, with mountains in the distance. There are few vehicles on the road, reminding one that England has 377 people per square kilometre, while France has 110. The difference is noticeable. Near Fanjeaux is a graffito that tells
another story: "GB Go Home". Earlier this year, a village in Brittany also saw anti-British graffiti, among them the phrases "British Out" and "Stop Speculation". As more than 150,000 Britons become resident in France, often unable and unwilling to speak French, the entente cordiale is beginning to look decidedly threadbare.
There is no doubt that the British are leaving en masse: they are heading not just to France but to points further afield. To listen to their stories and read the figures, the conclusion could well be that the country — or at least the south of England — is at full stretch. Undeniably, there's a squeeze. The UK population is expected to increase to around 65m by 2025: up from the 59.6m recorded in 2003. The number of incomers is fairly well documented. Less well known is the number of people leaving the country. What began as a cosmopolitan trickle in the 1980s to British expatriate zones such as Tuscany and the Dordogne has become a flood of Britons, often middle class, over 50, and peevish about the old country. "The fact is that people are being crowded out of southeast England," says Professor Tim Hatton, an immigration specialist at the University of Essex, who published a paper for the Royal Economic Society about the phenomenon. "Our best estimate is that for every 100 in, there's 30 to 50 out."
Think-tanks, estate agents, sociologists and a growing emigration industry are starting to chronicle this departure. The polls show wishful thinking as well as actual movement. ICM and YouGov have both found that over half of a large sample would, in principle, move out of the country. Surveys by the Centre for Future Studies and the Alliance & Leicester International bank show that a third of British people are actively considering a move abroad, with the bank projecting that 6m of us — over a million families — will be gone by 2020. Myriad "reality TV" programmes chronicle the tribulations of foreign relocation, as do innumerable books about restoring olive farms. They all send the same message: a better way of life lies abroad.
In the vanguard of expatriate writers of "escape" literature is Chris Stewart, the author of the 1999 bestseller Driving over Lemons: An Optimist in Andaluc’a. From his vantage point close to the town of Orgiva in the Andalusian mountains, Stewart has seen a huge inpouring of Britons. "You'd be blind not to notice their numbers," he says. "It's an amazing demographic phenomenon. I've just returned from market, and most of the people there seemed to be British." He will have seen a mere handful of the 750,000 Britons with homes in Spain.
The numbers of emigrants remains elusive. Government statistics show the number of "out-migrants" has increased from 266,000 in 1993 to 359,000 in 2002. A substantial rise, but possibly not the true figure, because the International Passenger Survey — the source of most migration statistics — doesn't isolate the emigrant from others that leave, including temporary students and contract workers.
