East End Review

Tag: River Lea

Along the Hackney Canal – book review: ‘A refined eye for the sublime’

Photograph: Freya Najade

In her astute and poetic introduction to photographer Freya Najade’s latest book, writer Esther Kinsky explains how East London’s “canals and the River Lea form a layered landscape of urban histories, of comings and goings, of the shifting interferences of land and water and nature and man”.

She’s describing a complex network of collision and change, and she touches on how a landscape, in the eye of its many beholders, is distinct and subjective.

“But not everyone feels the need to decipher it,” she writes.

Najade is one of the few, and her stunning collection Along the Hackney Canal is testament to her patience, her refined eye for the sublime and her apparent urge to explore the diversity of experience and place.

For a project focused on what might seem like a relatively narrow, objective topic, the images – always effective – are remarkably disparate and personal. It’s this variety and versatility that really elevates the work.

The collection begins with a moody, Dickensian scene of bare deciduous trees, placid water and thick mist. Slim branches intertwine and protrude at gothic angles. You can easily imagine Abel Magwitch, of Great Expectations, emerging from the deep; it’s a great start.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Amongst the photos that immediately follow is a series of more abstract shots of the water, with close-ups of its contents, which include a ducking swan, dreamlike reflections of puffy clouds and a plastic Iceland bag suspended in the flow.

Photograph: Freya Najade

There’s a painterly quality to some of these compositions, with colour and texture taking on an almost impressionistic dimension. One shot, of a mass of non-descript green matter in water, could easily be compared, in part, to a Turner – or even a Monet.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Flicking further, we encounter perfect arrangements of yellow-flowering bushes in full bloom, a cormorant arching its wings against a tangle of brown thicket, and a CCTV camera shooting vertically from foliage, recalling the gas lanterns of a stereotypically Victorian topography, but with a more sinister, voyeuristic edge.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Photograph: Freya Najade

Litter, or waste, runs throughout – an abandoned trolley, a derelict moped and a cardboard packet floating amidst a swirl of iridescent specks are juxtaposed by, for example, the flesh of red berries and a twist of brambles covered in frost.

Photograph: Freya Najade

A few images in particular are simply spectacular, and whoever at Hoxton Mini Press edited the project did a sterling job selecting which to draw specific attention to.

Roughly half of the photos are afforded a double page, some of which are extremely special: there’s a row of pastel-coloured houseboats lining the foggy banks of what looks like the Lea Navigation; there’s a gathering of Orthodox Jewish people running races on marshland; and there’s a snap of long golden grass, dry and swaying in an almost Southern-gothic manner.

Photograph: Freya Najade

You can imagine these three dramatic prints hanging in grand frames on the walls of our swankiest galleries.

Kinsky, in her intro, also writes about how “Freya’s gaze is not directed into the distance but into the depth of her field of vision, searching for the underlying layers of older landscapes spelt into the land”.

There is something in this that rang especially true for me when considering an image towards the end of the collection.

At the front of the shot is the canal, behind it a relic of old heavy industry and scattered further back are the traces of London’s relentless development; it’s a scene worth studying.

It would be a huge pleasure to work through Along the Hackney Canal in tandem with author Helen Babbs’s brilliant recent release, Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways.

Along the Hackney Canal is published by Hoxton Mini Press.
ISBN: 9781910566114. RRP: £14.95

Photograph: Freya Najade

Photograph: Freya Najade

September 5, 2016
Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways, review – ‘serious and fascinating’

Nomadic existence: author Helen Babbs documents 10 months living on a boat in her new book Adrift

If you’re given to walking, running or cycling around Victoria Park, or strolling from Mile End to Broadway Market on a Saturday morning, you’ll be familiar with stretches of the Hertford Union and Regent’s Canals. You’ll no doubt have noted the motley rows of eclectically-named barge boats, and you’ll probably have peered through the windows at the micro-homes within, wondering whether or not a life on the water could be for you.

Whilst most of us tempted by that nomadic, challenging existence will do nothing but imagine, Helen Babbs, acclaimed author of My Garden, the City and Me: Rooftop Adventures in the Wilds of London, has taken a more proactive approach. She traded in the comfort of central heating, mains electricity and community roots for a narrow boat called Pike and decided to document a 10-month period of her new life, travelling from the capital’s east to west in 2014.

Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways is made up of four seasonal sections split into poetic and informative vignettes. Thoroughly researched, it covers the disparate histories of the canals, the surrounding landscapes and natural habitats, and the unrelenting presence of development. As well as mulling over the wider social constitution and the reasons why someone might opt out of living on land, Babbs records the personal, day-to-day trials and triumphs onboard.

But not just about the anatomy of the city’s waterways, it is also a book about literature, and for those interested in nature writing, psychogeography and the literature of London, Adrift will be a treat. It offers a compendium of great works to discover and revisit. Babbs, clearly a well-informed and voracious reader, touches on figures such as Penelope Fitzgerald, Thomas De Quincey, Dickens and Virginia Woolf – mentioning the latter during a delightful musing on truth, perception and the capricious nature of place.

And then there are the many writers still working today with whom she shares themes and concerns, and from whom she appropriates various methods of dealing with her material. While literature has long been associated with travel and journeys – The Epic of Gilgamesh is at once arguably the first travelogue and the first work of literature – great British authors of recent years in particular have made use of a roving, fluid practice, writing beautifully about the landscapes they come upon and get to know.

Babbs’s use of the word “territory”, for instance, recalls Iain Sinclair’s – loaded with passion and politics – and her close, enthusiastic examination of the natural environment, albeit in an urban setting, has something of a holistic quality akin to the works of Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She references these writers – Sinclair and Mabey on numerous occasions – and nods superbly to Michael Moorcock’s Mother London in the final stages.

Perhaps less overtly, there’s something of George Monbiot’s Feral, and the re-wilding movement, running throughout. In a nice section dedicated to the Middlesex Filter Beds, she details the evolution of an old waterworks, from its original cholera-related purpose during the Victorian era to derelict, overgrown tranquility and on to official nature reserve. The book gives the reader a sense of the possibility, with the right management, of a more verdant London.

Style-wise, Babbs’s effortless prose is tight and lyrical, moseying along at a calm, steady pace, but there are moments both barbed and cutting. Here she is on the 2012 Olympics: “The mania of the sporting event long gone, the left-behind landscape is entirely altered. What came before has been comprehensively erased – the allotments, the dog track, the silty tides, the marooned boats. Mad old London running to the wild. We are a city that easily forgets.”

Adrift is a serious and fascinating book, and I’ll be sure to read whatever its exciting young author produces next.

Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways is published by Icon Books. RRP: £16.99. ISBN: 9781848319202.

July 6, 2016
Feral – Ulli Mattsson review: ‘urging new water through old riverbeds’

Ulli Mattsson. Photograph: Adam Weymouth

For Ulli Mattsson the water has always been synonymous with home. Growing up by a river on the border of Swedish Lapland, she has lived for the past six years aboard a former peat-transporter on the River Lea. This century-old barge has doubled as both abode and arena, acting as the stage from which she recently launched debut album Feral and its accompanying tour over the course of three intimate nightly shows down in Hackney Wick.

Feral’s invocation of the waterways acts as an antidote to homesickness that delves deep into the tradition of Scandinavian folk music. Beginning with ‘Blue Whales’, an elegiac waltz of blunted guitar cut through by pining strings, it is a song saturated with a yearning for landscapes of her past, for blue whales and other organisms not usually found in the depths of the Lea.

‘Mother’, the record’s lead single, similarly follows this notion of loss and yearning but with more dynamism in the music. The guitar is upbeat despite the bleakness of the narrative, and this renewed vigour propels the album forward.

Lyrically, the album seems to take its inspirations from folk oral traditions. Mattsson’s vocals, though minimal in range, materialise with a raw tenacity that conjures fragments of her homeland into a collage of aquatic ecology, oceanic mythology, and her own existence.

It is an album of stories that find their sources in both the individual and communal tales of sea-faring creatures, from the account of the lonesome ‘Riverwoman’, to references to Queequeg and the Sirens found in ‘Winter’s Waiting’.

Ulli Mattsson’s Feral. Photograph: Adam Weymouth

Whilst the first half of the record pays due reverence to traditional instrumentation, the song ‘Magpie’ ushers in a change of scenery. The sudden deluge of electronic instruments that appear in the middle-eight presents an interesting contrast to Mattsson’s personal take on the old ‘One For Sorrow’ nursery rhyme. It brings out a clear sense of divergence from what has come before, thrusting the record into new waters.

Subsequently, tracks such as ‘Wandering Lights’ and ‘Last Song’ offer some of the most surprising and interesting musical moments on the album in a honeyed cohesion between deep, ritualistic percussion, and the flash and twinkle of modern programming.

It is through this mixture of old and new, here and there, that Mattsson uses Feral to draw original noises from traditional sounds, urging new water through old riverbeds.

ullimattsson.com

April 27, 2016
Vinyl fantasy – The Record Deck casts anchor on the banks of the Lea

The Record Deck moored in its usual location. Photograph: Luke Guilford

The banks of the River Lea used to be a place where recovering vinyl junkies could feel safe from relapse, but that is no longer the case.

For taking a stroll down the canal towpath on any sunny weekend, you may well come across Luke Guilford and his floating record shop, The Record Deck.

The former librarian uses his barge as a de facto stock room, keeping everything from ‘the classics’ to jazz, blues and reggae – which can sometimes prove problematic for some.

“People like stumbling upon it, but some get a bit upset they found it because they were trying to not buy any records,” says Guilford.

“But I’ve found that record addicts will always find them wherever they are. I am one myself.”

Thumbing through the racks of reasonably priced records (usually priced between £5 and £10) stored underneath his bed and around his boat, he takes out a sample of his stock.

The Black Keys, Tom Waits and David Bowie sit neatly beside Django Reindhart, The Incredible String Band and an African jazz compilation.

Given the diverse nature of his clientele, trying to organise the front of the shop, which he hangs from the side of the boat, has become something of an art form.

“One day I decided to put a load of really trendy records out, then the first things I sold were The Shadows and Dire Straits. You can’t predict who is going to come along,” he says.

Guilford started the shop as an exit strategy from the rat race. With the pressures of his 9 to 5 job growing, he decided to put his life-long love of vinyl and his modest dwelling together to join the growing ranks of Hackney’s riverboat traders.

Currently moored alongside Springfield Park, The Record Deck can count a floating bookshop, a bar and even a hairdresser’s amongst its neighbours.

The Record Deck is based in Hackney on most weekends, but using the grass bank as his shop floor means opening hours are rather dependent on the weather.

However, Guildford keeps a box of records in the basement of Pages of Hackney on Lower Clapton Road for rainy days, and informs his Twitter followers of his location.

One of the advantages of the transient nature of the shop premises is that Guilford has become a regular feature at canal festivals around the country. This year he will be floating downstream to Field Day in Victoria Park and the Angel Canal festival in Islington.

Having lived on a barge for 16 years, Guilford’s love for life on the water has extinguished any desire to expand his enterprise or turn to the murky waters of online selling.

“A lot of people sell on the internet but to me that just sounds really boring,” he says. “But I don’t have any major plans for expansion apart from buying a load of nice records and passing them on to people.”

Follow @therecorddeckuk to keep updated on the shop’s location.

March 18, 2016
Beside the Leaside

Photograph: Sam Napper

The still, murky waters of the Lee Navigation may provide a bucolic escape for some, though they are far from immune to the vicissitudes of city life.

Pollution has taken its toll on plants and wildlife, hulking new-builds cast shadows over the banks of the water, while boat dwellers on this 45km-stretch, running from Hertfordshire through East London to Limehouse Basin, are finding permanent moorings increasingly difficult to come by.

Photographer Sam Napper is trying to make permanent records of life on the Lee Navigation as it is now. His Leaside photography series goes on display this month at Leyas in Camden.

“It’s a wilderness in London and the other canals are not like that,” says the 29-year-old, a keen explorer of the canals who moved to East London five years ago.

“As you get further out of London the Lee Navigation becomes more rural, even though it’s still in London, whereas Regent’s Canal and the other ones are very urban spaces.”

After spending weeks on the towpath taking photographs, Napper developed a rapport with some of the people living on boats.
“A lot of the people I met were complaining about licences being removed, mooring spaces being privatised… a lot of people were upset but my slant is that it’s a way of life to be celebrated.

“One guy who moved there with his family has just celebrated his first year on the canal. He said to me that you know you can ‘do a canal’ when you’ve done a full season, because winter is so harsh.”

Napper’s photographs capture life on the canal in all its variety, from the joggers and plushy marshland to the bankside remains of Britain’s industrial past.

“It’s a real mix of people in there and I’m not coming from it just from the point of view of people on the canal boats. They’re a big part of the community but it’s just as important for people who want to use it for leisure,” Napper says.

A film and TV producer by day, Napper describes his photography style as “reportage” and observational.

“I really like finding a unique subject and trying to make it isolated and symmetrical so it feels like a whole new environment that no one’s ever seen before,” he says.

Leaside
Saturday 15 August
Leyas
20 Camden High Street
London
NW1

August 6, 2015
Science and art combine to highlight River Lea pollution

Multi-media artist Rob St John. Photograph: Emma Cardwell

A water fowl making its nest with rubbish, green pond weed covering a river’s surface with tyres and empty plastic bottles. To most of us, river pollution looks something like this. But for Rob St John, there many different ways of seeing – and hearing – water pollution.

The Lancastrian artist, writer and musician, was commissioned by the Love the Lea project, run by charity Thames21, to use art and science to explore and document pollution creatively in London’s second largest waterway.

Almost a year later, and Surface Tension – an album of new music and field recordings – is complete. A book of photography and writing is to accompany the music, and this month photographs from the project will be on display at Stour Space in Hackney Wick.

Ben Fenton, of Thames21, commissioned Rob St John with the hope of raising awareness of pollution in the Lea in ways that can engage new audiences.

Over the course of a few weekends last summer, St John walked most of the length of the middle and lower Lea, taking with him various bits of recording equipment.

This included special microphones in his ears that record a 360 degree stereo field. Listening back he heard swans landing, bikes going past. Then, to capture the sound of the river itself he used hydrophones, microphones that go underneath the surface of the river and pick up what’s going on down there.

“It’s a bit like fishing for sound,” St John tells me. “ Sometimes it’s absolutely nothing, sometimes it’s really cool rhythms from propellors or boats.

“One of the most unusual sounds is when you put the hydrophones into pond weed. What it’s doing is photosynthesizing so it’s giving off all these tiny air bubbles.

“When they hit hydrophones they give off this wonderful bubbly, murky crackle, almost like electronica. “Under the surface of the Lea, with its oil slicks and duck weed, a surprisingly diverse world has survived.

Surface of the River Lea. Photograph: Rob St John

“The Lea’s amazing because there are still plants and animals and fish living there against all the odds. I was fascinated by the diversity that exists below the surface levels. So surface tension became this organising idea as a project title. It’s about the tension between two different things: clean and polluted, natural and unnatural, air and water.”

Alongside sound recordings, St John was portrayed the plight of the Lea visually by taking photographs with a pin hole camera made from a Lesney toy matchbox (the Lesney factory was on the river at Hackney Wick) and a vintage 120 film camera.

During the winter months, he then went back up to Yorkshire, taking with him bottles and bottles of Lea water, which he used to develop the film. “My girlfriend had the horror of seeing that I’d filled my studio with developing trays full of Lea water, and I had various films all soaking and degrading over different amounts of time.

“Some of them came out almost a bit out of focus and hazy, as a result of duckweed, oil or decaying leaves. Some of them had these incredible light flares and some of them just had a really light footprint of these weird microscopic bits of life.”

Scientifically, one of the most impressive methods used to create the music of Surface Tension is called sonification. St John gathered data from volunteer UCL scientists about pollutants in the river and was able to turn it into music using software.

“I fed samples in and then just let the data from each site define what that sound did. I’m really fascinated because it’s a very aesthetic and even arbitrary process what you decide to map onto what. It’s an area where there’s this real tension between science and scientific data and aesthetics and art, and that’s something I’m really interested in.”

Coming from Lancashire, it was interesting to hear St John’s perspective on the River Lea. “Maybe because it’s been so canalised it almost doesn’t feel like a river,” he says. “At least compared to when it flows round the back of Hackney Marshes where it seems to take on that lease of life again for a mile or so. That loss of wildness makes me ask if we’ve forgotten this is potentially an important biodiverse ecosystem.”

Surface Tension
Until 4 May
Stour Space
7 Roach Road, E3 2PA

Listen and order Surface Tension book/CD at surfacetensionriverlea.bandcamp.com/ album/surface-tension
surfacetension.org.uk

April 9, 2015