"It’s stimulating and I feel alive"
The Diary of a Watercress Fanatic at the Alresford Watercress Festival. Words by Jacob Negus-Hill
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The Diary of a Watercress Fanatic at the Alresford Watercress Festival.
The twenty-year-old watercress festival celebrating a 200-year-old British tradition, by Jacob Negus-Hill
It’s already unusually hot for a mid-May morning when I arrive in the peaceful Hampshire market town of Alresford. There’s a greengrocer selling fresh watercress on ice for a pound, while opposite, in a cafe called Loaf, the first thing I spot is a sign for a watercress smoothie, followed by watercress sausage rolls, watercress-and-cheese turnovers, watercress scones, and all the usual deli sandwiches but with watercress in place of the standard rocket. I buy a smoothie and head back out onto West Street, where I buy a bunch of the fresh watercress: it is unbelievably peppery, and by the time I’ve eaten the whole thing, my mouth is numb. At its best, and at its coldest, the green of watercress is a deep and dark emerald, with thick and hollow stems from which small, rounded leaves extend in clusters. When you chew it, the chemical process is similar to when you eat wasabi: your saliva macerates an enzyme present in the plant’s solid form into liquid, and the resulting compound is both refreshing and explosive. The feeling is not unlike the mala of Sichuan peppercorns, or the effect of cocaine on the gums; it’s stimulating and I feel alive.
At 10am – as per tradition – the Watercress King and Queen spring from their tower and ride through the streets by horse-and-cart procession. Their chariot makes its way from one side of the town to the other, followed by legions of musicians and several sects of Morris dancers. It stops intermittently while the king and queen (who are in fact two children from a local school) sling handfuls of watercress into the crowd. There are bells and whistles, the steady rattling of tambourines, and the thwacks of the Morris men hitting sticks together. A stray shoe flies into the crowd and is promptly thrown back; the audience cheers; children laugh. You could imagine Martin Parr ducking and diving between the wild arcs of stray bunches, trying his best to capture the Watercress Monarchy in its regal glory. But while the festival feels folky, acutely pagan and part of a long and unbroken English tradition, it’s actually all marketing – a twenty-year-old experiment to bring the once much-loved plant back into public consciousness.
Since 2004, people have flocked to Alresford for its Watercress Festival, held on the third Sunday of May each year. Alresford is a small town of around 5,000 people; now, on an average day, you can hear the water flowing down the paddies in its farms from the roadside, but 150 years ago it was one of the most important hubs in the country for the watercress trade. Many of the UK’s chalk streams are located in Hampshire, and watercress is dependent on the fresh, flowing water filtered through them, which not only cultivates its crisp bite but also its unique nutritional content (watercress – containing B1, B2, B3, B4 and B6 – has the maximum rating of 1,000 on the Aggregate Nutritional Density Index, which was developed by nutritionist Joel Fuhrman). In 1865, the demand for Hampshire watercress was so strong that a new line was added to the UK’s steam railway system, connecting Hampshire’s agricultural chalk streams and watercress paddies to London. This became known as the Watercress Line, and Alresford, the only town of any size in the area, was at the centre of it all.
In the 1800s, a breakfast of watercress eaten raw from the hand like an apple wouldn’t have been unusual. It was so popular in Victorian England that London’s morning markets would’ve rung with the shouts of woooooor-tercress, sung by impoverished, mostly female sellers who carried the plants – all shipped into the capital from Hampshire or Dorset – in full-to-the-brim hampers under their arms. Henry Mayhew’s landmark 1840s work, London Labour and the London Poor, contains a vignette called Watercress Girl; this shows how the sellers’ first customers were working-class labourers who, at 5am, needed something cheap and energising for the day. Victorians would often stick watercress in sandwiches, although the poorest – who couldn’t afford bread – would eat it plain. Even into the first half of the twentieth century and throughout the two world wars, watercress was shipped up and down the country to supplement rations.
However, by the 1970s – when the steam railway had declined – the watercress boom was over. In addition, a nationwide watercress-related health scare in 1979 (watercress is uniquely receptive to agricultural run-off, meaning wild watercress can harbour liver fluke – a parasite linked to livestock) hospitalised nineteen people and damaged the plant’s appeal. New industry standards stated that watercress must be farmed on a gravel-lined bed fed either by natural spring water (a geographical luxury), or a borehole (which is more water-intensive). Farms were left with a choice: move entirely to spring water or boreholes, or stop farming altogether. Because of the costs associated with changing their water supply, most opted to stop growing the leaf, thus vastly reducing the number of active watercress farms in the country. At the height of the watercress boom, there were 1,000 acres of farm; now it is closer to 100. The UK has lost its connection to watercress; if you look in British fridges today you’ll likely find a bag of rocket instead, a similarly peppery but more cost-efficient leaf that was introduced to Britain in the 1980s by Hampshire watercress farmer Steve Rothwell.
But walking the streets of Alresford on this celebratory May day, you would be forgiven for thinking that watercress is still thriving. I scout stalls selling everything from cough syrup and soap (‘They used watercress as a health tonic in Ancient Greece!’, the syrup-seller says) to burgers and pâté, all made with watercress. This celebration of the plant as both a culinary and cultural product is significant in a country where it is no longer widely eaten. Outside of Hampshire or Dorset, watercress is now mainly found in supermarkets, often blended with other salad leaves. Aficionados make the case that the flavour of bagged watercress is lacklustre, no comparison to the pungent bunched watercress they remember – the type that greengrocers used to sell, and the bunch I started my morning with. ‘The best is from Hampshire,’ one reviewer writes on the Sainsbury’s website, but ‘foreign watercress lacks flavour.’ Yet Tom Amery, managing director of the Watercress Association (a sort of watercress growers’ union) explains that, while watercress from Spain and France is available, it’s actually UK growers who have established the farms abroad, using the same plants we have in the UK. If there’s a difference in flavour, it’s most likely due to shipping times: watercress is fragile, best when eaten fresh.
The Watercress Association is currently fighting a battle to preserve the plant’s reputation amid ecological concerns focused around intensive, non-traditional-method watercress farms. Concerns about watercress’s intense borehole water usage and potential damage to chalk rivers – including pesticides, and silt and sediment run-off – were magnified following the industry changes in the 1980s. In response, entirely new industry standards have been formed, and farmer John Hurd pioneered an organic approach to growing the plant. Since 2019, watercress has fallen under the Traditional Specialty Guaranteed scheme, ensuring shared practices that weed out unscrupulous growers (farmers have been caught trying to sell land cress – a far less nutritionally rich and flavourless plant – as watercress, riding off the crop’s reputation). One evening, after several pints in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Arlesford, I get talking to a volunteer for the festival. Leaning against the bar, he becomes more and more impassioned about the state of watercress farming. ‘The festival’, he bellows, ‘represents a last attempt to put watercress on the map. It is political resistance and defiance in the face of changing British agriculture.’
The festival’s genesis can be traced back to the early 2000s, when the watercress industry felt there was a lack of understanding about the importance and benefits of this exceptional plant. One tactic was to modernise watercress’s reputation, which resulted in some dubious attempts at rebranding. In 2003, The Watercress Alliance enlisted the help of a PR firm to run the award-winning campaign Not Just A Bit On The Side. The idea was simple: get glamour model Jo Guest, garnish her with watercress, and hope the message would be clear enough. The following year, the first Watercress Festival took place in Alresford, and by the second, they had funding from the Watercress Alliance.
Today, the shape of the watercress industry has changed – people are making money, but that money is mainly in the hands of big groups who own multiple farms. Hurd tells me that when he first started farming watercress in Dorset in 1953, there were only four types of salad leaf available. ‘Now it’s more like twenty-four,’ he says. Hurd has one of the UK’s biggest watercress market shares and is the first certified organic grower in the UK. He tells me that one of the reasons watercress has declined is that the salad-leaf market is now ‘full of competition’. Despite making his money from supermarkets (he is the sole organic supplier for Waitrose), Hurd also laments the decline of the UK’s greengrocer economy; watercress used to be sold locally in hand-picked bunches, with the entire stems and stalks still attached, but these days it is (mostly) machine-harvested and shipped to supermarkets, which monopolises the output. ‘One of the only places that can really afford to establish its own direct watercress supply chain is Pret [a Manger],’ Amery explains. Pret has its own sources and supply chains because consumers are realising the health benefits. ‘Thanks to watercress’s nutritional density, it factors in the health-food markets, which Pret taps into,’ says Amery. ‘Even brands like Lush are buying watercress for blends in hair care.’
Despite the increased use of native produce in Modern British cuisine, it might be too much to argue that watercress is having a culinary revival. Still, at St. JOHN in Farringdon, you can eat a green salad composed almost entirely of watercress covered in dijon vinaigrette. The watercress is delivered daily from Thornicrofts at New Covent Garden Market, who are in turn supplied by Hurd. Steve Darou, St. JOHN’s Canadian-born head chef, is just as enthusiastic about watercress as me. ‘The only rule we have for our green salads is that [they’re] at least half watercress,’ he tells me. He also garnishes any roast bird with watercress, echoing Jacques Pépin, who argued that nothing goes better with roast chicken. (Both Darou and Pepin are right: there isn’t much that can soften a spring or summer roast bird with as much complexity and ease as a peppery side of watercress.) ‘When I was a chef back in America and Canada, watercress wasn’t a thing,’ says Darou, ‘but here, it’s such a special crop that we try to make the most of.’
Back in Alresford, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the festival is tradition or marketing, because people are in a frenzy. Sure, there are more exciting food events in other countries. Spain still has bull-runs and tomato festivals, there are rowdy wine harvests across the continent, and rice is celebrated with offerings, processions, and community-constructed artworks throughout South Asia. But there’s something special in Alresford, too: a unique local product harvested this very morning, and one that tastes better when eaten fresh out of the ground. Here we all are, bathing in the knowledge that this is the best of the best, premium watercress, and we’re throwing it around with abandon. Today I won’t get speared by the horns of a bull, but a stray watercress missile does soar in my direction, only for the gentleman next to me to intercept it with cat-like reflexes. I shake his hand in a jolly, formal, English way and then, when he hands the bunch to me, I keep hold of it – much like a soldier might the bullet that almost took his life. And then I stuff it into my mouth.
The 2024 Alresford Watercress Festival takes place this week on Sunday 19th May. For more information, click here.
Credits
Jacob Negus-Hill is a chef and writer based in London. He has previously been the editor for Proper Mag, a Manchester-born menswear magazine, and has been published in The Face, the British Journal of Photography and Kerrang! amongst others.
All photos by Jacob Negus-Hill unless otherwise stated.
To learn more about the history of watercress, please read this article by Bee Wilson in the Financial Times.
My mum loves watercress, I've eaten it all my life. Didn't know about this, might have to take her one year, it actually sounds like a really fun day out.