“You can have a high level of unobtrusive security without it looking like Colditz,” he says. And if you are looking for good investment, James Pace from Farrar & Co in Fulham believes gated properties can command a premium of up to 10 per cent over the equivalent on public streets. Joint developers Countryside, Taylor Woodrow and English Partnerships have included a number of security cameras around the development, which will eventually extend to 1,400 homes. Priced from just over £200,000 a unit, the eco-friendly site is viewed as a pioneer for future building, so maybe the Big Brother approach will catch on.FPDSavills’ planning director David Henry concedes that there is a “perception of rising street crime, so the demand for gated communities has increased”; however, perhaps the key to how these safer spaces are built may not be too far off the Greenwich Millennium Village model after all. If Wilkinson’s public appearances border on the self-flagellatory, Michalak’s are the very definition of carefree bonhomie.”Wilkinson? He has great experience and is used to playing the big matches, but he is not my preoccupation or my priority,” he said, in answer to the predictable questions about Sunday’s personal set-to in the England-France semi-final at the Olympic Stadium. He talked for 40 minutes without a care in the world; had he been any more relaxed, he would have been asleep. Others have had their moments – Carlos Spencer, Semo Sititi, Brian Lima, Joe van Niekerk, Rupeni Caucaunibuca – but Michalak is the talk of the tournament.Yesterday, at the French team base in Bondi, he appeared before a full battalion of media types with a stud in each ear, two days’ growth on his chin and a haircut straight out of Papillon.

He is marking out his territory and reminding his elders and betters that they are not dealing with a Joe Ordinary here.And this is the man, a month into his 22nd year, who has put a torch to this jamboree and set it ablaze. When he trades training-pitch punches with the hardest of the hard, Fabien Pelous or Olivier Magne, it is not merely for the purposes of a joke. By the same yardstick, it is difficult to imagine Michalak doing anything else. There is no hint of privilege about him; raised in difficult circumstances in one of the more challenging suburbs of Toulouse, he made himself strong – abnormally strong for his frame – because the least sign of weakness would have left him face down in the gutter. But the contrast between the two outside-halves is akin to that between earth and water, and the Tricolores see the difference as something to be celebrated, not mourned.By common consent, it is scarcely possible to imagine Wilkinson, a solitary obsessive whose skills were honed on the manicured greenswards of private-school Hampshire, play-fighting with Martin Johnson in the back of the team bus or plotting some outlandish circus tent prank on Jason Leonard. They respect Jonny Wilkinson for the very Englishness of his qualities and regard him, despite his trials and tribulations during this competition, as the single greatest threat to their long-cherished ambition of a place in next week’s final.

He has some spirit, this prodigy from the rough side of town. No wonder they call him the “anti-Wilkinson”.
The French did not invent this unusually vivid sobriquet as a means of insulting the most relentless accumulator of points in English rugby history; far from it. Michalak hits the target – when does he ever miss? – and then uses his street-urchin cunning to avoid the worst consequences of his victim’s fury. There, waiting in the corridor with a bucket of cold water, is Fr?ric Michalak – the new shooting star of French rugby, an incandescent amalgam of Codorniou and Maso, maybe even a Blanco for the 21st century. Stirred by a sharp rap on the door, the granite-jawed hooker stumbles blearily across the room and reaches for the handle. It is four in the morning, and Yannick Bru is in the land of dreams.