Scarp

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But some of the more abstract flights of fancy in this book such as his imagined 'life as a rook' and the historical fiction, felt like a distraction from what would otherwise have been a more interesting read. Every couple of years Jason and I, and whatever accomplices we rope in, descend on the increasingly unfamiliar homeland to wrest the secrets from a corner of town not yet explored. New fences have been erected, diggers chunter round on a large adjacent plot, the old bus is still parked at the end of a long driveway. I will settle for losing myself in alien surroundings over the navelgazing torment involved in this lark. Long arms of brightly tiled pedestrian tunnels feed into a large central rotunda gathering the echoes of footsteps and conversations into an aural soup.

The Royal Waterside development of 265 luxury apartments within a ‘new neighbourhood’ bemusing dubbed First Central (East Village is bad enough but at least it’s in the East – this is neither First nor Central). Curling inside his looping journeys across the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment, on which Papadimitriou de-romanticises ruins and tweaks the erogenous zones of gold courses, are other narratives that bend like tiny dimensions inside the bigger shell. This would be a walk through Nick country, although I didn’t realise at that point just how literally. I enjoy eccentricity, so happily listened to Nick prattle on about Gilbert White, the Woodcraft Folk, and the mysteries of Middlesex. Some of the prose is beautiful; he has a wonderful turn of phrase, and his observational detail is superb.This is, I suppose, psychogeography and there on the back of the book are favourable quotes from Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Iain Sinclair is best known for his book London Orbital, an account of his walking and exploring the terrain close by the M25. I then went straight into writing This Other London, and despite a couple of attempts to revive the show it just never happened.

I passed beneath the mighty Mill Hill Viaduct in time to see the sun aligned with the apex of its giant arches and approached Totteridge and Whetstone just after sunset.I urge you to read the results: they are haunting, strange, lyrical, poignant - a testimony to a life that is triumphantly less ordinary.

The Pied Piper might have played his old tunes, but at the end we arrive into a new one, uplifted even as we are set down. He worries that mass digital technology has enabled us to atrophy these circuits before we even knew we had them. On the way to the Abbey Nick wanted to check in on a mound that he has been fascinated with for around 25 years since he first discovered it. Perry Kurland's journal is a sequence of what are effectively modernist prose poems that hover between profundity and the hilarious.

The site where our walk had ended 10 years ago was still a patch of rough ground at the end of a mini-industrial estate. A 'deep topographical' dive into the escarpment just south of where I grew up and where I spent a lot of time as a child.

Centred on a sort of survey of a belt of high ground to the north of London, it also dips in and out of the author's personal life, particularly his adolescence. The Lockdown has caused me to excavate the rushes I shot in 2008 for my documentary about Nick Papadimitriou, The London Perambulator. It almost feels like an act of ‘Deep Topography’, diving into what Nick describes as ‘storage vats of regional memory’.

I have simply never read anything like Scarp before, and despite the odd flaw, it remains an astonishing achievement. Stevens, he saw cassocked monks wandering the meadows and some at work “building a new rick from the new-mown hay”. I found that the torrent of inner voices I habitually heard began to organise itself in relation to the landscapes I passed through, the things I saw.