Adventures in the Lea Valley: stirring images of strange and surreal beauty in East London

Photograph: Polly Braden and David Campany

Ask anyone the reason why they moved to East London, and chances are you won’t hear the response: “To be close to nature.”

But East London has nature in abundance, with the Lea Valley a particular jewel in its crown.

The valley, which stretches down through Hertfordshire through East London and into the Thames near the Millennium Dome, was formed by glacial melt around 10,000 BC.

Adventures in the Lea Valley, a new photobook by the ever-prolific Hoxton Mini Press, documents the lower Lea Valley in 2004 and 2005, as well as after the London Olympics in 2012.

It contains stirring images of the valley’s strange and surreal beauty and captures a recent past that is now forever lost as regeneration takes hold.

Photographers Polly Braden and David Campany met in 2004 and embarked on a project that saw them roam around the Lea Valley on bike with one camera and a light meter between them.

Some of the images are instantly evocative of that time. A man scales a ladder to put the finishing touches to a billboard featuring a demonic-looking Tony Blair. “Imagine five more years of him,” the advert reads.

Given what we know now – the 7/7 bombings, the success of London 2012 – many of the images are of what seems a more innocent time.

The cover image is of four children playing in a pile of rubbish on a misty morning on a road close to Springfield Park. One boy is the same size as the abandoned hoover he is standing next to, whilst another shiftily clasps a shovel under his arm.

Photograph: Polly Braden and David Campany

Elsewhere a little blue footbridge has been daubed with the message: “Fuck Seb Coe,” reflecting community resistance to the Olympics and fears that East London’s patchwork wilderness could be erased by the Olympic legacy.

In these “disconcerting times”, so described by Campany in his brief yet warmly-worded introduction, the pair stopped venturing out into the Lea Valley to take photographs, and got married and started a family together.

But after the Olympics they took up the project afresh, returning to the site of some of their earlier images to see how it all had changed.

“Instead of pragmatic wilderness there were now landscaped parks, manicured greens, and the continuous sprouting of what property developers like to call ‘luxury apartments’,” Campany writes.

These more modern photographs show an East London imbued with a certain sheen and confidence that perhaps stems from its recently-found status of being at the centre of all things cool.

So instead of boys hanging out and kicking the dirt underneath a flyover, two young women with designer handbags walk along the towpath, smartphones in hand. A young man operates a drone on Hackney Marshes, and so-called luxury flats are reflected into River Lea beneath them. In another ten years, these images will also be viewed with nostalgia as the Lea Valley continues apace on its journey towards who knows where.

Adventures in the Lea Valley is published by Hoxton Mini Press. RRP: 14.95. ISBN: 9781910566121

Photograph: Polly Braden and David Campany