English Letter: Alresford is pure England. The purest England. What the French would doubtless call l'Angleterre profonde. What people in the US would call cute. This little town in deepest Hampshire is the quintessence of rural Albion.
But, like many of the most traditional parts of the European Union, this emblematic collection of Englishry is kept together with immigrants and labour contracted in another country and another continent.
There's a pretty main street which dips down to the gentle Arle river where from time to time the Morris dancers gather. A pub or three. A parish church with its Saxon rood, square crenellated tower and graves of Napoleonic prisoners of war.
A station is the terminus of a steam railway which wanders over the hill to nowhere in particular. It is kept going by volunteers on the footplate and in the pretty Victorian signal boxes keen to take us back to the heroic days of British railways.
There's a well-regarded Indian takeaway - but the fish-and-chip shop was doing a roaring trade, too, when I visited. But watercress is the pillar of the town's economy. The Tiffin Tea Rooms serves watercress sandwiches and, indeed, watercress ice cream, if you like that sort of thing. And the Alresfordians have no illusions about themselves. "People are a bit sleepy here," says Robert, a local businessman, in a sleepy sort of way.
Tired of the modest Englishness of Alresford? Then go a few miles west to the grand but still modest English metropolis of Winchester, city of King Alfred, once the capital of England and still a little resentful that parliament hasn't met here for a few centuries now.
The cathedral, a former Benedictine abbey ruined by Taliban-like Roundheads in the civil war, shelters the mortal remains of ancient English kings, St Swithun - they think - and Jane Austen and Izaak Walton in its great, long, white nave.
A short walk south from the cathedral lies the Hospital of St Cross, whose buildings date from 1132 and where the visitor who asks for the wayfarer's dole gets a piece of bread and beaker of beer.
Of course, the thing about the whole very enjoyable English shebang that is Alresford is that it isn't at all what it appears.
Behind the Hampshire somnolence, the sleepy rural persona; across the counters where they serve the watercress ice cream or pull pints of bitter, beat hearts of the sharpest commercial acuity, the trading instincts which made England an important trading nation. Such English acuity does not happen without a great deal of non-English help.
Alresford makes a very tidy living on its watercress: tons of it go out every week. Charles has one of the biggest watercress farms. In a heated plastic shed millions of seeds grow into a carpet of vegetation which looks like a hundred yards of the greenest billiard table.
In all but the worst winter months the seedlings are transplanted a few days after germination into great square beds outside the size of football fields and, to the sound of gently trickling water pumped from the chalk aquifers deep underground, the watercress grows.
Six or seven weeks later the green leaves of this plant are ready for harvest and the supermarkets.
"Watercress used to be just a garnish - now it's a year-round favourite", says Charles. But in the bracing airs of a 21st-century European Union, it's not the sturdy yeomen of Hampshire who do most of the planting, harvesting and packing.
"We get quite a lot of very good workers from Poland," says Charles. "Some of them are highly qualified people, almost brain surgeons. It seems a pity they can't get better jobs in their own country. But we pay better over here."
The Poles are put up in local accommodation, and without their help the business would most likely falter. They include skilled craftsmen who return time after time.
"We had a Polish mechanic and panel-beater and he did wonders for our vehicles if they got dented," says Charles. "We were really sorry he didn't come back last year."
Nor would the business be as smooth throughout the year without stretches of land Charles bought abroad. He and his partners bought one piece outside Jerez in Spain to which Andalusian peasants have flocked for work. Another was bought in Florida and employs Mexican workers.
It's these which produce the watercress in the winter which is flown in when Alresford supplies are less reliable. "It's simple to get good labour in Spain, and the Mexicans are fantastic workers," says Charles.
Is Alresford then really an all-English, Morris-dancing, ale-quaffing, nerve-centre of the international watercress market? Of course it is. But with the lusty yeomen of Poland, Andalusia and Mexico pushing hard from behind.