Scarp

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Were the flights of fancy with outlandish characters just padding or did the author think he was digging deep with this imagined reality? Iain Sinclair is best known for his book London Orbital, an account of his walking and exploring the terrain close by the M25. This buried pipe is an unavoidable motif when walking with Nick – it was what guided us on the first walk, it punctuates the traipses in London Perambulator, and appeared again when Nick joined me for one of the expeditions in This Other London. Up until around the 1770s it was a manor and was owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital from the 15 th to 20th centuries. A series of walks across Scarp, loosely stretching from Harefield in the south-west to Hertford in the north-east, forms the main thread of the book.

Merops is an eternal spirit narrating the past and future events in Scarp from his aerial perspective whilst Nick weaves in his own experiences as he comes as close to the ants, hedgehogs and herbs as humanly possible. It almost feels like an act of ‘Deep Topography’, diving into what Nick describes as ‘storage vats of regional memory’.I don’t think anybody, with the possible exception of Will Self, really knows what psychogeography means but that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of it about. There is nothing cleverclever here; the loss is real, an uncomfortable gift that allows Papadimitriou into a hypernatural (rather than supernatural) world of un-ageing spirit-tramps and ghosts of dismembered cars. Papanikolaou also addresses the huge impact that the new LGBTQI and anti-racist legislation has had and how the LGBTQI movement in Greece now has the power to be even more intersectional and more inclusive. A mostly crap scrap of the neither-here-nor-there London exurbia is the subject of Nick Papadimitriou's wonder Scarp.

The exception I'd say was Nick Papadimitriou's autobiographical passages about his childhood and early years but they were well narrated and did at least relate to his home environment and his interaction with the area.Papadimitriou goes out walking, he tells us, dowsing for ghosts with "an 18-inch boron rod which I keep rolled in a stitched sheet of rabbit fur". Although I hadn’t told him of my spontaneous decision to walk one of his beloved rivers of the London Borough of Barnet, in his role as genus loci of the area, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d sensed my intentions. But what I wasn’t prepared for was that this book would combine all that stuff with one of my other pet interests which is books that are, for want of a better description, really quite weird. His prose shifts between precise descriptions of hyper-particularities encountered in the landscape and passages of glorious delirium such as when he passes into the psyche of an eighteenth century botanist: Magic mushrooms, anyone?

He describes the activity of walking and exploring as a cathartic phenomenon worth nurturing, and feels that landscapes shape his mind as he progresses onward. It is a sort of saga of mindless modern Britain where people drive 300 yards and there seems to be a supermarket on each corner. Together they have undertaken many walks, and recently taught a course related to topography at Brunel University. It is, as a friend noted, a salute to the rewards of simple rambling, of going somewhere unusual and just strolling, or flaneuring to use the specific vernacular of psychogeography.The chapters are arranged as a series of walks in the vicinity of what the author refers to as the ‘Scarp’, otherwise known as the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment. In a riot of metamorphoses he takes all the roles, collapsing together time, objects and people into a "pulsating county consciousness". When pursuing these obsessions with various collaborators we had a pretty clear idea of what we were digging at but had not much of a sense that there were very many others out there with the same interests. From 2009 to 2011, along with Rogers, Papadimitriou hosted Ventures and Adventures in Topography, a radio show on Resonance FM.