West LeaFarm Shop

West Lea Farm Shop stands among its own watercress beds on the Itchen Stoke Road outside Alresford, beds built by a local farmer named Curtis at Ladycroft around 1890 and still worked today. The shop began as an honesty box selling nothing but watercress from those beds and has grown since into a fuller larder of soups, scones, sausages, trout and bread, with most of what it sells still coming from producers within a few miles. Commercial watercress growing arrived in the valley around 1865 once the railway made it possible to get the crop to London markets fast enough, and the beds here have been part of that story ever since. Herons and egrets still work the same water the watercress grows in. The shop closes on Sundays, keeping otherwise to a straightforward farm-shop day.