While we are most at home photographing homes, we are sometimes left wondering what the streets surrounding our listings might look like through a different lens. This is why we have asked photographer Freya Najade to take her cameras out in Hackney. Using the area guide of one of our most recent Hackney listings – an exceptional two-bedroom house designed by the architectural practice Chance de Silva – as her brief, Freya photographs “the brokenness and the beauty” of the borough she has lived in for nearly 20 years …

Words Dale Berning Sawa

On a recent Sunday in early June, Freya Najade got up before the sun did and left the house with her cameras. Freya likes best to shoot in colour, at the bookends of the day, “to capture the beautiful light”.

Her destination was London Fields, a leaf-shaped park that hovers just north of the southern boundary of Hackney, in east London. In 2013, the council planted what it calls a “pictorial meadow” to the south of the cricket pitch, with annuals and perennials — corncockle, poppy, oxeye daisy, cosmos, purple viper’s, a medley of grasses — and simple throughways you can wander down. 

The meadow is tended to every spring. Some of the plants grow as tall as a person. Come mid-May, the park’s gardeners remove the fences and — as with the other wildflower meadows in Hackney Downs, North Millfields and beyond — the locals who use these parks find their love has been rewarded. Walk down one of the well-trodden paths and your sightline is muddled by bumblebees, butterflies and petals dancing in the breeze. “The flowers in the sunrise,” Freya thought, “that’s an atmosphere to capture”.

A straight, smooth cycle path through London Fields takes you from Hackney Town Hall, past the meadow and down to a bridge over Regent’s Canal, by way of Broadway Market. Freya arrived here just as vendors were setting up their stalls and baristas fixing their tables. Here she was after portraits and “a little bit of the vibe in the early morning”. 

Freya doesn’t tend to take photos of people without asking. Instead, she talks about “encounters”. She watched one lady set up her stall in the sun. In the park, she found a man sitting on a bench with a bunch of stuff to read and they ended up speaking about whether you should iron your jeans or not.

Hackney, where Freya has lived since 2007, is all vibes. After months of rain, Freya’s assignment heralded a change in the weather. As it has warmed up and dried out, you notice more and more open windows. Cyclists have their shirts unbuttoned and their speakers on. Dog walkers and delivery guys are wearing shorts. Children are eating ice-creams and scooting about with such reckless abandon that parents are calling out – in Patois and Polish and Spanish and Turkish and French and Bengali and every language you can think of – to “stay by me and mind the bikes!” The borough is letting its hair down. 

I meet Freya after her shoot on the terrace of a back alley vegan café, just off the Narrow Way at the top of Mare Street. More than storytelling, Freya tells me that, as a photographer, she looks for a feeling. “It’s not about the thing itself, or at least not only about the thing itself. Maybe there are flowers growing on the side of the street, but ideally, that makes me feel something else. I’m interested in that.”

Since getting her dog, Brooky (a gentle whippet) she has explored so much more of the area’s green spaces. It’s long walks with Brooky that brought about the body of work contained in Freya’s third book, The Hackney Marshes – an indelibly atmospheric account of one of London’s most startling spaces and the people who are drawn to it.

When bomb rubble choked the city during the Luftwaffe’s Blitz in the Second World War, what was then the London County Council homed in on the marshlands to the east of the River Lea as a prime dumping ground. Nearly 2.5 million cubic metres of brick, concrete and stone rubble were piled on top of the Hackney and Leyton marshes and topped with soil from an upstream reservoir dig. This raised the ground by three metres and birthed the country’s largest grassroots football scene, with 135 pitches created. Decades of Sunday league footballers have headed there ever since. 

But, as Freya has so beautifully captured, people also go to swim in the river when it’s hot and walk with hoods up when it’s raining. They birdwatch and linger and have picnics even when it’s overcast. Some skateboard and tag – and many homeless people camp – under the motorway overpasses that frame the open spaces.

This deeply urban nature resonates with Freya, who grew up close to Dortmund, Germany. “The town I grew up in was in the middle of nothingness,” she says. “There’s industry and there’s countryside. We lived at the edge of a small town, where there was a gas station and a used car dealership. Our road had six houses, and the first one was a farm. On the horizon you could see factories. I’ve always felt drawn to similarly hybrid places.”

Like most of London, this is an area of stark contrasts and socioeconomic inequality, and Freya talks about “disappearing Hackney”, the side of the borough that still resists how gentrification is reshaping the city at large.

In February, Caroline Woodley laid out her first budget as incoming mayor of Hackney, saying that government cuts have left the borough with significantly lower income, in real terms, than in 2010 — the beginning of austerity. She was balancing the budget, she said, but the council still needs to make as much as £50m in further savings by 2027. All of which means that letting park grasses grow tall and flowers sprout where they will on pavements and curbs is as much driven by the imperative to boost biodiversity as it is by the need to do things on the cheap. Whatever public money there is is needed for crucial statutory expenditure. 

Freya’s work takes all this in: the brokenness and the beauty. “This edge of Hackney is evened out, more and more,” she says. “But still, I like to capture it.”

Watch Freya in action here.