Hackney Marshes pic: Matt from London

The first screening of the film Losing The Marshes by local film maker Kym Oeser will be shown on Monday, 9 September at the Kenton Arms pub in Homerton at 7pm. It is a documentary which Oeser started making in 2007, two years after London’s Olympic bid was successful. It is being shown on the same night as a council planning meeting about building on the marshes.

According to the film’s website the documentary “observes the people that surround the Olympic site and the changing landscape of the area and questions what will be the Olympic legacy”.

It covers what happened at East Marsh, which was concreted over to form a coach park and has been further expanded since.

Local campaigners from the Save Lea Marshes campaign are hoping that the council will retract planning permission for a 60-space car park which has already been built on East Marsh, at the planning meeting this Monday, 9 September.

They are against this car park and other plans for a car park to be built on the land near Cow Bridge, because they want the land to remain green open space.  The Save Lea Marshes Campaign held a walk last Sunday called, Walk for Wild Marshes to raise awareness and show support for retaining the marshes as they are.

Caroline Day, of the Save Lea Marshes campaign, told the local news website Loving Dalston: “The concern before and during the Olympics was that areas on the marshes that had been used on a ‘temporary’ basis would not be restored to how they were .”

The council have argued that they want the car park to improve accessibility to the marshes for people playing sports and to ease the congestion on the roads.

Earlier this year the council said there would be no blanket permission for events to be held on the marshes and they would be judged on an individual basis after complaints were made about Radio one Hackney weekend held there last year.