The little corner of New York that could be renamed 'Little Britain'

Anyone walking east down Jane Street in the West Village yesterday morning would have known they were approaching the border. There were puddles on the road when the rest of Manhattan was bone dry and somebody had laid little sections of plastic lawn around the bottoms of all the trees.

Oh, the anticipation. Only a few more steps and we would be entering the McVitie's Zone, a special place all of its own in New York where it is okay to worship Hyacinth Bucket and to smile without fear of rejection because of our tell-tale teeth. Welcome, dear Dairy Milk-deprived expat, to Little Britain.

All right, we are a little ahead of ourselves here. Wrest yourself from your daydream and look at the little green street sign. It says Greenwich Avenue as it has done for generations. Never mind that the block is home to that little oasis in Gotham of British comfort cuisine, Tea & Sympathy. But renaming the block Little Britain is, in fact, exactly what the owners of the restaurant, Nicky Perry and Sean Kavanagh-Dowsett, have in mind. They are quite serious. So serious, they launched a petition drive last week to persuade the local community board and the Mayor to allow them to do it.

There is nothing unsophisticated about their campaign. They hired a marketing company to create a website - www. campaignforlittlebritain.com - brought Virgin Atlantic on board as a co-sponsor and staged a press event with flight attendants and the English soul singer, Joss Stone.

Zealots for Queen and Country - the benign visage of Elizabeth II looms over punters in the restaurant as they slice into their Welsh rarebits - may be putting it a bit strong, but it is worth knowing that Ms Perry and her husband are pretty determined people. They have two other businesses on the block - Carry on Tea & Sympathy, selling British sweets and so on, as well as A Salt and Battery, a traditional fish and chip shop.

She is explaining the project, over a strong cuppa of course, when Mr Kavanagh-Dowsett rolls up in, you've guessed it, a good old London cab. The back window is shaded with one of those semi-see-through decals promoting the Little Britain effort. His seat-belt buckle is a huge, sparkly Union Jack.

"What she does over there is a British dominatrix dining experience," says Venky, who lives above the Soy Luck coffee shop opposite Tea & Sympathy. (He prefers to withhold his second name.) "But maybe the British like that sort of thing".

The manager at Soy Luck, Andre Springer, agrees that most of the locals are afraid of Ms Perry. But he lets on: "A lot of the residents have been complaining in private. They don't want the name of the street to change."

Ms Perry, who came to the US from London 24 years ago and has had the restaurant for 17 years, is unabashed. When a regular said the other day he felt disappointed because no one had been rude to him, she rolled up a newspaper and thwacked him on the back of the head. "There, that's better," she told him.

As for any local resistance to the notion of creating a bit of England in their neighbourhood, she seems blissfully unaware.

"You know what, actually they love the idea. I don't think I have ever had a row with anyone on this block, ever. When you bring new people to this block who is going to argue with that?"

Because, that, of course, is what it is all about - customer traffic. It is already the case that tourists flock to Tea & Sympathy and Ms Perry's other businesses precisely because of the Britishness of it all, just like tourists like to visit the faux French bistro in Epcot in Disneyland or the Paris Hotel, replete with scaled-down Eiffel Tower, in Las Vegas. On a Saturday morning, you can wait for a table at Tea & Sympathy for 45 minutes. Usually there are some Japanese in the line, but always there are the Brits.

Why the British - who presumably left home for a reason - feel the need for such institutions isn't clear. But they do. They pack the bar at the Soho House, the offshoot of the British club, just a few blocks away for the same reasons presumably. It's a tribal thing. They do better getting drunker together than most Americans and bask in some misplaced sense of shared superiority, although this conversation doesn't usually concern our gastronomic or dental prowess but our alleged better grasp of irony.

For them, of course, the Little Britain idea is surely a good one. While Ms Perry agrees that the name change should apply only to their block - trying to re-christen all of Greenwich Avenue would be "greedy", she says - she hopes that a broader swathe of streets will take on the new identify. And there other Brit businesses around. As well as Soho House there is a British bangers and pork pie shop, Myers of Keswick. Myers, at least, is on board with Little Britain. Soho House is keeping its distance.

What Ms Perry provides for the Brits is therapy. "People who come here for the first or second time are people who are suffering from homesickness. They have a craving, but they don't what they are craving. That's where the sympathy comes in". And the baked beans.

And there are so many Brits in New York these days. "When I first got here you rarely heard a British voice. Now when you go to Macy's it's only British, you won't hear an American."

Which might suggest that New York has had enough of us already, though it's not that they hate us. "They think we are kind and very considerate," a nameless young British woman at Soy Luck says about the appeal of the British to Americans between the sheets. "But they think we have bad teeth and beer guts."

New York chased us out in 1774, so does it want us recolonising now, even if only a block at a time? And, if Tea & Sympathy, meanwhile, and Myers of Keswick are clichés of things British that would look out of date back home, isn't this more spoof than a serious reflection of national culture?

Not so, says Mr Kavanagh-Dowsett. "Some people say we are being a parody of ourselves, but we are just trying to be real".

Arguably, they are only playing the Americans at their own game, consolidating their brand. "We have been very busy for years, but if the by-product of this is getting busier that's fantastic," says Ms Perry. "At the end of the day, we all want more customers. It wasn't my initial motivation, but I'll take it."

And there are precedents. The Italians in New York have Little Italy, after all, the Koreans Koreatown and the Chinese and East Asians Chinatown. Why not a Little Britain? Look at it that way and getting the green light from the city's fathers should be a piece of cake. Fruit cake, of course.