A Few Words About Watercress

Watercress grows in the shallow moving water of streams.  I recall we used to regularly collect it growing wild and abundantly at Springhead when I was a child.  The flavour is sharp and peppery and we added it to soup and put little piles of it on top of Welsh Rarebit (which we pronounced Rabbit).   It seems to grow effortlessly, all the year round and old Mr Bassant next door told us that was because the water kept the temperature mostly even.   In wartime when oranges were in short supply it supposedly stopped you getting scurvy.  His adopted daughter Ina said the best watercress beds were in Hertfordshire near Croxley Green where she went for her holidays in the thirties and that was because the springs around there were the best in England.   I privately thought our own Springhead springs were probably just as good and most likely better.  

We used watercress regularly but it wasn’t always popular with everyone in fact it only gathered a following after someone called William Bradbury who lived in Gravesend, opened what he called his Hygenic Watercress Farm in 1808, later moving the business to Rickmansworth.   Henry Mayhew reports in 1861 in London Labour & The London Poor that its first coster cry in London Streets urged householders to try `Fresh woorter-creases’.   A young hawker called Eliza James and known as The Watercress Queen was selling it through areas of Birmingham as a five year old some years later and apparently sourced hers from established beds in Surrey. By then it seemed to be known as Vitacress.

There seems to be some argument as to whether Springhead is in Northfleet or Southfleet which is just a tiny bit annoying because I do rather want it to be Northfleet.   I’m informed, however, that the whole reason behind Sir John Sedley in his will of 1637 bequesting five hundred pounds for the establishment of a free school in Southfleet is precisely because of the success of the watercress business – Southfleet’s watercress beds!    Apparently the iconic red brick front of the school still survives and remains firmly in use as an education facility.  It’s incorporated into the structure of the local primary school.    Maybe someone will have a photograph.