Continuing Story of Cressroads

Read all about us 21st century Cressroadians

Welcome to Greater Cressroads,

Watercress capital of the world and Land of the Tichbornes, where comfortable Cressroadians roam in their Chelsea chariots.

Where today’s Pizza Express was Broad Street’s Bodega in days when cricket’s commentating John Arlott, ex-Basingstoke-born police officer, was changed out of his constable’s uniform and making sound waves as Cressroads’ much-loved author, Guardian columnist, poet and sports broadcaster.

Naming the Bodega his local, and inviting Wootty, Helen and their regulars back to taste alternative wines from the cellars of his family home at the corner of Sun Lane.

Once an inn of the same name, today’s residential Old Sun is a left-hand-side landmark, when entering Alresford by way of the A31, and headed south to Winchester. All eyes peeled for the fourth exit on the left to Tichborne and its thatched medieval Arms. A measured mile-and-a-quarter down the derestricted lane to where the real ale flows and Captain Stewpot skippers its kitchen crew.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

It was one New Year’s Eve, a mile or so more down the A31 towards Winchester, Arlott’s son died at the wheel of his father’s gift of a sports car.

Thereafter, retired to Guernsey and through to the time of his own death, Arlott wore a black tie in remembrance of his son as well as penance for his own role in the family tragedy.

What Arlottism would result if, all of these years later, the Hampshire voice of bat and ball the world around were to be stopped in its spiritual tracks by signs directing the doyen of cricketing commentators to view John Arlott Court and Cricketers Mews wheeled, dealed and developed out of the long back gardens of his adopted hometown’s Grange Road overlooking Perins’ School sports field?

A  town once boasting five cricket grounds but, three centuries later, reduced to watching nearby Old Alresford and Tichborne squares keep the game alive in Greater Cressroads.

Cressroads’ generations of watercress growers

Idler’s book of Crap Towns pegs New Alresford, pronounced Allsford, as the ‘43^rd Worst Place to Live in the UK: Population 5,000; famous resident John Arlott; and Watercress railway line once visited by Philip Schofield.’

Its review concludes: ‘Purgatory with hanging baskets. As with most Middle England enclaves, the only non-white residents work in its Chinese and Indian restaurants. Great if you’re three or 53. Shite if you’re anywhere in-between,” pens Perins School old boy Dan Kieran.

No mention, however, of generations of watercress growers - Ladycroft’s elderly John Curtis, to name but four - who, as young as 12, remembers tying labels to basketfuls of the town crop, before it was taken by lorry to the railway station in town for the journey to London’s Covent Garden Market on what is remembered as today’s Watercress Line.

Kept puffing by volunteer enthusiasts for the tens of thousands of trippers to the once Saxon borough and busy corn as well as wool market town, when William the Conqueror made his capital of Wessex and England in neighbouring Winchester.