As I mentioned before, I don’t like locales. But of course, the solution is blindingly obvious and had passed me by. Unicode Support on FreeBSD points out the correct solution, which avoids breaking ls.
% export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=POSIX
Marvellous. Now things can autodetect that I’d like UTF-8, please.
Jabbering Giraffe 