Water Cresses, Come buy my water cresses

This scene of watercress sellers, one of eight ‘cries of London’ subjects etched by Thomas Rowlandson in 1799, mocks the sentimental and idealised portrayal of street traders by the artist Thomas Wheatley, whose Cries of London series were exhibited and published in the 1790s. While Wheatley family of flower sellers stand meekly on the street corner, Rowlandson’s mother and two children thrust bunches of cress at a scowling man who they have, perhaps knowingly, disturbed on his way to visit a brothel. Two women, presumably sex workers, look out at the scene in amusement from the first floor window of Mrs Burke’s on the corner of Portland Street.

Watercress sellers were among the poorest of London’s street traders; the eldest child in this picture has no shoes. Watercress grew all year round (though slower in winter) in the streams and growing beds just outside the city, and would be picked and sold daily as it soon perished. Street sellers worked independently, buying it from London’s markets early in the morning, and washing and tying it into small bunches to sell as an affordable snack or meal accompaniment, mainly to working class labourers. With the coming of the railways in the mid-1800s, watercress was transported daily into London from Hampshire and other surrounding counties, and sold to hundreds of street traders at Farringdon market.