82 pitches across North Marsh, South Marsh and Mabley Green, and not one shopfront among them. Your website is the only sign a customer will ever read.

Hackney Marshes

136 hectares of protected common, 82 pitches, and no parade anywhere on it.

Hackney Marshes is 136.01 hectares of protected commons on the River Lea flood plain, formed by periodic flooding that historically kept the land from being permanently occupied. The London County Council bought 337 acres of it in 1890 and opened the site to the public in 1893. Hackney Council's own description puts 82 football, rugby and cricket pitches across North Marsh, South Marsh and Mabley Green, along with 31 changing rooms at the Hackney Marshes Centre and 16 at the Hackney Marshes Pavilion, a cafe bar with a roof terrace, meeting rooms, a trim trail, a bird hide, a conservation area and a tree nursery. Mabley Green itself has its own history: taken in 1915 for the National Projectile Factory and converted to a recreation ground in 1922.

None of that is a shopping street, and nothing here trades like one. The businesses working the marshes are coaches running Sunday league sides, groundskeepers maintaining the pitches, league administrators booking them out, physios treating players between matches, caterers running the cafe bar and functions, and the conservation and tree-nursery work the site needs. A customer for any of them is standing on open grass, not walking past a window, and the only sign they will ever read is whatever comes up on their phone.

That decides what the website has to do. It has to say exactly which marsh - North, South or Mabley Green - and which building, load fast on a phone with patchy signal at pitch side, and give a number somebody actually answers, including on a Sunday morning before a nine o'clock kick-off. A generic "Hackney football coaching" page that could describe any park in London does none of that; a page that names the marsh and the building does the whole job a shopfront would have done anywhere else.