The Marsh Chronicles

In January 2016, just before our daughter turned one, we moved from Dalston in East London about a mile or so down the road the Lower Clapton. It may not seem like a significant relocation, but it brought us closer to Hackney Marshes and the River Lea.

The ‘marshes’ are made up of a large area of (mainly) football pitches, with a few rugby and cricket pitches, a canal, a river, several patches of woodland and some wetland areas which were once filter beds to clean the water for drinking but now nature reserves. There is a good population of kingfishers all along the river as well as herons, water voles, weasels, woodpeckers, foxes, very large rats, seagulls, swans to name but a few. It’s also the preferred evening roosting spot for the thousands of parakeets that have made East London their home.

Once you cross that canal, which basically separates urban Hackney from the marshes, you enter another world, far removed from the chaos of the big city.

I’d walked along the river once or twice before we moved, after a bus ride up to Stamford Hill, but it seemed like a very far away place from where we were living at the time. However, that relatively short move to the new flat brought me just that bit closer enough to spark a very long project.