The family behind Pimpernel.

Pimpernel exists because we needed it and it didn't exist.

We're Will and Jenny. A few years ago we did the thing you might be thinking about: packed up a British life, moved the whole family to France, and discovered that the gap between the dream and the paperwork is roughly the size of the Channel. We learned most of it the hard way — the visa we nearly got wrong, the tax return that terrified us, the préfecture queues, the letter that turned out to matter enormously — with our children in tow and, somehow, an ever-growing cast of dogs, cats, chickens and donkeys who came along for the ride.

When we looked for help, we found two kinds of thing. Glossy sites that skated over everything in a cheerful paragraph and then tried to sell us a mortgage. And, increasingly, guides clearly written by nobody at all — AI, churned out by the yard, confident and wrong in equal measure, with not a single human who'd actually stood where we were standing. Neither was any use at 11pm with a form due in the morning.

So we built the thing we wished we'd had: deep, honest, genuinely researched guidance for British life in France, written by people who've lived every line of it — and who are still here, still doing it, and happy to be asked.

You'll notice we keep our own life private — no faces, no location, no children's names. That's a deliberate choice, and frankly a good habit for anyone building a life in a new country. You don't need to see our kitchen table to trust the guidance; you only need to know that real people, who have actually done this, stand behind every word of it. We do — and we're not going anywhere.

Why "run by real people" is the whole point

It would be cheaper and faster to let a machine write all this. Plenty of our "competitors" now do exactly that. We think it's a con — because the moment the answer actually matters (a deadline that bites, a letter that has to be right, a rule with a nasty exception), a confident guess from a language model is worse than useless, and there's no one to carry the can.

Everything on Pimpernel is written and kept current by us. When you use the tools, they're built on what we actually know. And when you ask us something — especially the consequential things — it's a real person who reads it, someone who has been through it, not a chatbot having a punt. That's not a feature. It's the entire reason we're worth your time.

And we don't hide behind the website. You'll find us in the Pimpernel community — answering questions, comparing notes and cheering people on as they find their feet — because a knowing friend you can actually reach is the whole point.