I was excited to find this book, being both a fan of Hoxton Mini Press AND the Lea Valley. When my wife and I lived in London, in Leyton, it was an area I came to know fairly well. We’d sometimes take the bus from where we lived out to Tottenham and walk back along the canal. We’d walk out to Hackney Marshes and explore the old sewage works, which had the best blackberries I’ve ever tasted. On Sundays, we’d have a full English at the greasy spoon by the Lea Rowing Club. It featured in my rubbish attempt at a Chemical Generation novel. 

Braden and Campany’s book is a beautiful mess, confusing, contradictory, inconsistent in style and content. It’s reassuring and depressing in equal measure. It is, because of this, a perfect expression of the Lea Valley, which will lull you into buculoic reverie and then slap you in the face with industrial ruin without warning. It’s a place for families going pond dipping with their kids, and a place for fly-tippers. This is clear from the introduction: it’s a very personal immersion in and expression of a place. Nothing is being sought, or hunted down. It is full of happenstance: a drowning bug, kids smoking spliffs on a picnic table. It’s an excellent example of what Agnès Varda describes as making art through ‘gleaning’. There’s no definitive statement being made here, but a record of coming to terms with facts, stories, emotions, images. It’s, albeit arguably, somewhat essayistic in its approach. 

That’s not to say the book is apolitical by trying to embrace everything. Far from it. Against the background of the Olympic Park and gentrification, individuals and communities assert that this is their land. It may be that Braden and Campany were aware that much of the Lea Valley is registered common land, or they may not, but there is a palpable presence of the rights of everyday people – common people – to roam and use the land as they see fit. And that neither corporations nor politicians should have the right to take this away. 

There is much in the photography that I recognise in my own work: the post-industrial sublime, the idiosyncratic and abstract. I suspect these works, loosely identifiable as landscape in the introduction, are Campany’s. But Braden is more a documentarist and a portraitist, and her striking and tender depictions of people, whether posed or going about their day, communicate the human activity of a place in a way that I struggle to do in my own work. At the end of the day, it’s people that make commons what they are, and however much I can frame a stand of pines or a grassy tuft in a mire, juxtapose barbed wire against an ancient beech, the immediacy of human activity is absent. How I accommodate this is something I need to consider. 

Braden, P., & Campany, D. 2016. Adventures in the Lea Valley. London: Hoxton Mini Press. 

The Gleaners & I. [feature film] Dir. Agnès Varda. Ciné Tamaris. France. 2000. 82 mins.