Type ‘Hackney Riviera’ into Instagram and a paradise will appear before your eyes. A pretty swimming spot on the north-east side of Hackney Marshes, it’s a place where young people splash around in the sunshine and lounge in the shade of overhanging trees (one 2018 post shows model Edie Campbell there, tucking into an ice lolly). The scene is so idyllic — and yet so close to urban sprawl — that it feels too good to be true.
Photographer Nick Waplington knows it well; he spent a month there with his camera in the summer of 2018. “I was amazed by it,” he says. “People were barbecuing and swimming and there was music playing. I’d never seen anything like it.” His photographs, published in the book Hackney Riviera (which can be bought with a print at jesusblue.co.uk), conjure up pastoral scenes by John Constable. One shows a line of women swimming while holding hands, while another captures a young man sitting on the branch of a tree.
