Fragile Rivers (4/5). In the marshes of the Lea, a tributary of the Thames, an oasis on borrowed time

London is known for its green spaces, vast, sometimes even wild. The British capital, 8.9 million inhabitants, has splendid royal parks – Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, Richmond Park or St Jame’s Park – and many commons, remains of communal lands from the Middle Ages, such as Hampstead Heath, an astonishing green lung in the north-west of the agglomeration, immortalized by the painter Constable in the 19the century. To the northeast, on the outskirts of the city, extend the Marshes, the Hackney Marshes or the Walthamstow Marshes, marshy areas that have been partly dried up or that serve as water reservoirs for the capital.

Between industrial wastelands, poplar woods and wide meadows, these barely developed expanses represent a vast bubble of nature, a refuge, even a hidden paradise for the inhabitants of Tottenham or Hackney – districts very popular with artists or intellectual professions for their rents relatively affordable, with many pockets of deep poverty. Freya Najade, a German-born photographer who has been living in London since 2008, fell in love with her work along the Hackney Canal (Along the Hackney Canal, Hoxton Mini Press, 2015, untranslated).

Under the filtered shade of the willows

In his latest photographic series, The Silent Passing of Thing (“the silent passage of things”), Freya Najade fell in love with this area of ​​nearly 130 hectares “ located ten minutes by car from my home, very busy during the pandemic”. Locked away in cramped apartments throughout the spring of 2020, deprived of travel the following summer, many young people, alone, with friends or with their families, converged on the canals or the banks of the Lea river, a tributary of the Thames crossing the marshes from north to south. His shots of bathing scenes under the subdued shade of the willows could have been taken in one of the bucolic meanders of the Thames in the heart of Oxfordshire.

“This place is a real space of freedom for people, it is this palpable feeling that attracted me a lot. » Freya Najade

Less than 10 kilometers from Trafalgar Square, the change of scenery is total. The place was even dubbed ‘Hackney Riviera’ during the pandemic. To the point of worrying the local authorities, who recalled that swimming was prohibited in the Lea, one of the most polluted rivers in the country, in which the water management companies do not hesitate to discharge their overflows of dirty water, especially in the event of precipitation. “Swimming in these waters poses a risk of infections and diarrhoea,” clarified Hackney City Council in April 2021, and “litter and barbecues disturb wildlife, including kingfishers and owl nests”.

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