Nature campaigners are staging a walk to highlight their claim that the borough’s marshes should be retained as wild places.

Campaign group Save Lea Marshes (SLM) is to hold a ‘Walk for a Wild Marshes’ rally tomorrow afternoon to spread the message that the lower Lea Valley is under increasing threat from development and inappropriate use.

They also claim the authorities want to use the areas for financial gain.

Caroline Day, of SLM, said: “The aim of the walk is to raise awareness of development plans but also to illustrate how much the community cherish their free access to the marshes and appreciate London’s vital green lung.

“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 back to how they were before.

“This fear has been borne out.”

Another campaigner, Abigail Woodman, said: “We have to show the powers that be, in this case the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority, Hackney Council and Waltham Forest Council, that we are not prepared to stand by and let them take our green spaces away from us.”

The walk will start at Leyton Marsh at 1.30pm, where SLM says the Olympic basketball training venue has not been appropriately restored, and finish at the former golf course at the WaterWorks centre in Lammas Road.

They will then walk through areas in both Waltham Forest and Hackney where they say areas are under threat of enclosure, development or construction.