Scarp

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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. So when I mooted another walk and various exotic possibilities were floated it seemed inevitable that we’d end up back somewhere in the vicinity of Stonebridge Park and that Nick’s sacred ley line gurgling through a 48 inch pipe beneath the pavement would play a role. Finally, came Gareth Rees‘s Marshland, hallucinatory, speculative non-fiction about the marshes of Hackney and Walthamstow that combines Scarp‘s deep knowledge about a specific locality with the dry wit and accessibility of This Other Land. Between 2009 and 2011, Papadimitriou co-hosted, with John Rogers, two series of a radio show on Resonance FM entitled Ventures and Adventures in Topography.

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.

We gaze into the fast flowing waters of the River Brent beside the Wembley Travelodge then move on along a muddy path through a spindly outcrop of trees that runs beside the river on one side and a council estate the other. G. Ballard’s work after ‘Crash’ and ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, but there’s nothing of that cold, surgical air here: this is deeply heartfelt stuff, sometimes rich to the point of absurdity. The geography is psycho, not the writing – there's no escalator in sight but lots of bogs keen to suck at your legs, "sink-holes, shake-holes, hushes and shafts" to fall down, and low-slung clouds to befuddle you.

He clearly knows a fair bit about a lot of different things - history, geology, flora and fauna and folk mythology just for starters and uses these to play cat and mouse with his reader. The mixture of desultory adventure, hallucinatory encounter and close attention to detail and junction irreversibly transforms whatever it was we may have thought `mundane' to be. A counterpoint to the English countryside books written by landowners with meadows and orchards that I will never have.Nick explores the region in which as a nihilistic teen he committed arson and was taken to prison, weaving his experiences into a poetic thicket of descriptive prose that includes strange drifts into fanciful historical fiction, accounts from curious figures in his past (including the hippie girl we’d all love to meet), and a trainspotter’s account of the area’s (deep) topographical make-up. Every day the walk makes its shape: Armitage oils his feet and heads off after his "difficult hours" in someone's spare room; he often gets a little lost, finds the path, looks about himself, "more moor".