Starts with watercress; ends with gin

22nd May 2025

This story starts with a journey to a watercress farm and ends with an unexpected bottle of gin. That’s what happens when you follow a thread of curiosity to see where it leads you.

Last weekend, I travelled to Surrey with my dad to see his cousin, Barrie. They hadn’t met up for a while and wanted to see each other. For me, though, there was an added fascination: seeing the area where my grandmother grew up.

My grandma spent her early years in a village called Peaslake, a tiny place in the Surrey Hills that’s now a mecca for bike riders on a sunny day. My dad showed me her childhood home, as well as the church where she’d been married. The roads to and from the village are out of a storybook, trees arching to meet across single tracks.

Swan gliding along the lake by Kingfisher Farm Shop in Abinger Hammer

Then we headed off to Abinger Hammer, a couple of miles away, where Barrie lives. It was perfect early summer weather, a clear blue sky. Families were having picnics by the stream, kids were splashing in the water, a cricket match was taking place in the background.

Abinger Hammer has a famous clock that pays tribute to the village’s history as a forge, with a figure of a blacksmith who strikes the clock every hour with his hammer.

In this fabulous video from 1986, Barrie talks about how to grow watercress.

My grandmother’s family, the Coes, started the watercress farm in Abinger Hammer, which Barrie still looks after. He showed me and my dad a wonderful display of memorabilia relating to the watercress farm, dating back to its earliest days.

A timeline showed that two Coe brothers paid five shillings a year to rent the plot from the local Wotton Estate in 1854. In 1888, the farm was growing around 400 tons of watercress a year. In 1900, my dad’s grandfather, Edward Francis Coe, took over and started trading as R Coe and Sons.

Commuter cress

Watercress was cut in the early hours, starting at 4.30am. It travelled to London on the 6.30am, 7.27am, 8.05am and 8.40am trains from Gomshall to be distributed to shops on the same day it was harvested. I love the idea of watercress rushing to catch the early morning trains into the city.

By the 1950s, Good Friday had become the busiest trading day of the year, with the farm workers harvesting at least 3 tons of watercress. Due to the Bank Holiday train service, the railway had to put on an extra coach especially for the watercress so it could reach London Bridge in time for the wholesale markets.

Kingfisher watercress box in the old ‘bunching shed’

Barrie started as a watercress grower in Abinger Hammer in 1957, under the guidance of his father and grandfather, and has stayed there ever since. He might not have his wellies deep in the watercress beds every day, but he still keeps a keen eye on everything that’s going on.

The watercress relies on the source of fresh spring water that rises up from an artesian well in a nearby field. Barrie took us to the far end of the farm, where we could see and hear water gushing through channels in every direction, expertly funnelled into the growing beds and an adjacent stream.

In the 1986 video, a much greater area was given over to watercress beds. Now, some of the beds have been converted into trout ponds, as the family has downsized the watercress business and expanded its farm shop.

Garnet red English peonies on sale at Kingfisher Farm Shop

The shop has its origins in the 1970s, when local people asked Barrie to bring back the occasional cauliflower or lettuce from Covent Garden. As small shops declined and large supermarkets sprang up, Barrie and his wife, Margaret, filled a gap in demand, sourcing and selling local produce. More recently, they added a Flower Shop, with an emphasis on seasonal British-grown blooms.

The egg table

It grew from there and today the farm shop is thriving, run by Barrie’s daughter, Marion.

I have a weakness for farm shops, and this one is beautiful. Local eggs stacked on a wooden table, framed by a backdrop of daisies in a duck-egg blue tin pitcher. Jersey royal potatoes, outdoor-grown rhubarb and, of course, Kingfisher watercress grown on the farm.

Watercress about to take a starring role in a cheese, Marmite and watercress sandwich

My eye was drawn to two items in the shop. First, a chopping board made from locally sourced tulip wood, with the name R Coe and Sons branded on the side. This was created to celebrate 170 years of watercress growing on the farm. The name is burnt into the wood using a pre-1950s branding iron originally used to mark tools and wooden planks at the watercress beds.

One of these chopping boards is now at home in my dad’s kitchen. Fittingly, we used it to create a watercress, cheese and Marmite sandwich, as recommended by one of the watercress workers. Which, as long as you love Marmite, is an absolute winner.

A bottle of Silent Pool Kingfisher watercress gin, by my dad’s newt pond

In the shop, the other thing I immediately noticed was a display of bottles of Silent Pool gin. I’d always assumed that Silent Pool was a clever name dreamt up to evoke a mysterious source of the spirit: a gin spring, perhaps. But on this visit we drove through the village of Silent Pool, where the distillers are based. They simply took the name from the location.

One of the women working in the shop was delighted to tell me that she’d been instrumental in encouraging Silent Pool to create a special small batch of Kingfisher gin, using extracts of watercress, tomato vine and pomelo. A delicious combination.

In the picture above, my bottle of Kingfisher Silent Pool gin is perched next to my dad’s newt pond – a good place to hang out after a fascinating journey through watercress beds and family history.

 

 

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