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Adventures in the Lea Valley: Documenting East London before & after the Olympics

Adventures in the Lea Valley is a fascinating photographic journey through East London’s Lea Valley before and after the 2012 Olympic transformation. It's a collaborative project between London-based photographers Polly Braden and David Campany who started taking photographs of the area in 2004, just before London won its bid to host the international games, and the whole region started to change dramatically.

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People sort through discarded items and rubbish on a street in East London's Lea Valley, with graffitied walls and residential buildings in the background

Speaking of their work, David said: "London’s Lea Valley is strange, exciting, ugly, beautiful and unaccountably mysterious... an unplanned patchwork of nature reserves, social housing, yuppie apartments, small industries, scrap yards, football pitches, golf courses, cycle tracks, forgotten architecture and vast areas of nothing in particular...There are Londoners who are drawn to its enigmatic allure, and Londoners who don’t even know it is there."

At first Polly and David were drawn to the landscape’s peculiarities – its economic contradictions, ecological fragility and its haphazard character without really knowing how the project would finish. Over 10 years have passed since they first ventured into the Lea Valley, and with the passing of time, the project as a whole now serves to document the transformation of this once lesser-known pocket of East London.

Now available as a book, Adventures in the Lea Valley is published by Hoxton Mini Press, and contains a wealth of images from the exclusive series.

Via Creative Boom submission | All images courtesy of the artists and Hoxton Mini Press

A woman crouches on grass with a small dog while children sit on a wooden platform at the water's edge, with a person jogging on a grass bank behind them near wooden fencing
Three figures stand on bare ground beneath a concrete motorway overpass, with fields and distant hills visible beyond
Group of children and adults gathered around motorbikes and quad bikes in an industrial area of the Lea Valley
Narrowboats moored along the Lea Valley canal with electricity pylons stretching across the landscape beyond
Two people in white protective suits stand by a canal towpath near a gondola, with a sports facility and grey sky beyond
Pale blue metal footbridge crossing a waterway with green algae bloom, graffitied with "RUCK SHED", surrounded by trees and industrial structures in the Lea Valley
Bare trees with moss-covered trunks reflected in still water, with residential buildings and a white car visible across the canal in winter
Woman seated at a table inside a closed establishment with a "Closed" sign visible on the window behind her
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