Scarp

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And there’s the murky December day we went to the former site of Ashford Remand Centre, now HMP Bronzefield named after the Bronze Age settlement that was discovered during the building of the state of the art prison. Mary’s to the white traffic noise of the North Circular Road, which along with the building of Park Royal Station in 1903, had sounded the death knell for this rural idyll. 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 full lysergic glory of Pinner Hill is revealed in one chapter, the anti-rustic beauties of Edgware in the next. Instantly we were in a cooler, dark green environment where the effects of Montserrat's active volcano were less immediate.Pete seems happy just to go along for the ride too taking snaps with his Lomo Actionsampler camera, although the only action to sample is our plodding along the tarmac. Maxwell described a day spent here in 1927 in Just Beyond London under the heading of, ‘The Monks of Middlesex – a haunt of Ancient peace at Twyford Abbey, missed by the growth of the mighty city’.

The dancers explore the modern glass spaces in and around the atrium area of the Alison Richard Building and echo the works by artists from the Contemporary British Painting Group. Nick Papadimitriou’s exploratory walks led him to coin the phrase ‘Deep Topography’, an amalgam of writing and observation. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. There are large holes in the upper floors giving a clear view upwards through the building to the leaden sky.Again, Rees is fond of that psychogeographical turn of phrase – ‘There is no final draft of London’, being a particularly fine example – but laces it with humour as he explores this odd landscape of rave holes, filter beds, football pitches and reservoirs (and a fascinating landscape it is too), mixing in a bit of fiction and even offering an audio soundtrack. Self's droll psychogeographic adventures are more fun but they lack the sheer Joycean scope of Papadimitriou's ramblings: this is the hard stuff. We’re told a great deal about this arrest, but much of his life remains unclear; he is not especially interested in detailing his time in prison or afterwards. An extraordinary book by a man with a unique and inspiring perspective, SCARP will change the way you view the places and spaces around you, and reveal a forgotten London you never knew existed.

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. I remain curious because the fantastical aspects of this book are fascinating, and by far the best thing about it, and I wonder where it all comes from. Almost twenty years ago I found myself sitting eye to eye with Nick Papadimitriou in the basement of an art gallery, just off Queen Square in Bloomsbury. It is an important book, helping us to understand that life and history is on our doorstep and is not another country.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. The prose is sometimes edgy, fast-paced and visceral - but is equally prone to longer passages of lush descriptive work - not least when Papadimitriou strays from a well-worn personal path and finds a new vista just feet from his more routine walks. The image I had in my head that inspired these thoughts was of the Mill Hill Viaduct in a winter sunset. Those dynamics reflect, on the one hand, the relentless will-to-action informing Papandreou’s political persona and, on the other, the political upheavals, headlined by the protest movement against the US war in Vietnam, in which his politics were enmeshed. Here he is almost on common ground and up against the capital's modern saints of dystopic psychogeography: the master of the meaningful roundabout JG Ballard ( Concrete Island), and the leggy pair of Will Self ( Walking to Hollywood) and Iain Sinclair (whose M25 – in London Orbital – is the unspoken tarmac hedge to Papadimitriou's ambition and stride to the north of his scarp).