Freya Najade’s The Hackney Marshes is a book about one specific piece of ground: the open fields, riverbanks and scrubland that lie in east London and remain, for most of the year, stubbornly ordinary. Najade photographs it anyway — close in, at eye level, in whatever weather the place offers. Her attention goes to the people who come to swim, to run, to be outside, and equally to the wildlife that was there before them.

Many of these pictures were made during the confined days of the pandemic, when the marshes were among the few open places Londoners could still reach. You feel it in the bathers escaping lockdown, in the overgrown woodland, in skies wide enough to stand in for a holiday. The photographs hold two impulses at once: delight in how much life this ground sustains, and a colder awareness of the damage it absorbs. Neither cancels the other, and the sequence is stronger for it.

An introduction by Rosalind Jana accompanies the pictures. The photographs throughout are Najade’s.

Hoxton Mini Press published the book in 2022 as a 112-page hardcover, in a trim of roughly 24 by 29 centimetres. The proportion is not incidental. A format wider than it is tall lets Najade’s horizontals — treelines, the far bank, a flat field running to the edge of the frame — sit on the page without being squeezed, and the pace of turning pages comes closer to the experience of standing in the place.

For a collector, the argument for this book is subject rather than scarcity. It records a stretch of London that is heavily used and lightly photographed, at a moment when its users were unusually conscious of it, and it does so with a photographer’s patience rather than a news photographer’s speed. It sits well beside other studies of the urban edge, where city and non-city negotiate their terms.