62. Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp: In Search of London’s Outer Limits

I keep seeing references (in Phil Smith’s work, but elsewhere, too) to Nick Papadimitriou’s “deep topography.” What does deep topography mean? Why do other walkers see it as an important model? There was only one way to find out: to read Papadimitriou’s book, Scarp: In Search of London’s Outer Limits. 

Like other psychogeographical texts, Scarp consists of multiple layers: accounts of the walks Papadimitriou took while researching the book, and earlier walks as well; autobiography or memoir; and accounts of the lives of imagined—Smith refers to them as “mythic” in his discussion of deep topography in On Walking . . . And Stalking Sebald (86)—characters who inhabit the landscape Papadimitriou studies. I’m going to undo the layering in this summary (as I did in my summary of Smith’s book about walking the route W.G. Sebald took in his book The Rings of Saturn) and think about his walking, his memoir, and his mythic characters in turn. I realize that separation pulls apart the mesh (to use one of Smith’s favourite words) that is created in the text, but I’m not sure it’s possible to summarize Scarp without thinking about each of those layers in turn.

But first, to what does the word “Scarp” refer? The first paragraph of the introduction describes Scarp:

A vast yet seemingly invisible presence hovers over the northern suburbs of London. Screened from the consciousness of the city dweller by the pressures of the day-to-day, by self-concern and an inward-looking and anthropocentric culture, the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment—or Scarp as I prefer to call it—broods and waits. (1)

Note the personification of that landform: it is alive, capable of brooding and waiting—for what is one of the questions that comes to mind. It is almost one of the mythic characters Papadimitriou imagines (or encounters) in his narrative. Papadimitriou identifies with this escarpment: 

Winter brings the sound of water gushing below low points in the suburban streets and shopping parades as the streams that rise on Scarp swell and are channelled beneath Edgware, Pinner or Ruislip and flow towards their confluence with two broader rivers which embrace London’s northern margins, the Lea and the Colne. . . . I, too, flow downhill through time and distance from some as yet undiscovered point of origin on Scarp, and the growing awareness of this builds in me a desire to return. . . . I realise yet again that my destiny is bound up with Scarp. (1)

Papadimitriou is somehow linked to Scarp: he needs to return to it; his life parallels the flow of the water that springs from it; and his “destiny” is tied up with it. And, as you will see, he is often fused with it.

As Papadimitriou walks in the fields and woods on Scarp, he thinks about the human lives connected to it: “A sense of lives real and imagined rises from the steel streams of cars passing endlessly along motorway cuttings, and gazes from the trains that curve through Scarp’s lower levels at Edgwarebury or Carpender’s Park” (2). He also thinks of the lives of birds, mammals, and insects, “those sentient beings whose undervalued and endangered domain of coppice and spinney, burnt-out car and fly-tipped mound interpenetrates the human world” (2). All of these are inhabitants of a landscape that is ignored, perhaps because it is part of London’s northern suburbs: 

Despite being some seventeen miles from east to west and attaining in excess of 400 feet above sea level in places, Scarp is seldom commented upon by either topographers or psychogeographers, and seemingly possesses no cultural currency. Sliced by railways and motorways, topped by old roads running its length, repeatedly scarred in the name of civic utility, yet never acknowledged openly as possessing a coherent identity, Scarp nevertheless persists in the infrastructural unconscious of the northern reaches of the city. (3-4)

The notion of an “infrastructural unconscious” is interesting and perhaps productive, although one does wonder where such an unconscious would be situated.

“Scarp has been a presence in the back of my mind from my earliest days,” Papadimitrious writes. He remembers looking at it in the distance when he was a child (4-5). As a young man, he went for a walk there, and forgot his immediate concerns (romantic rejection and an expanding bald spot): these were transcended, he writes, “as my senses were drawn beyond the distant downs into clouds, sunlight and a sense of cold grey oceans. It was my first direct encounter with Scarp as an agent of consciousness expansion, my first intimate exposure to its perception-altering power” (6-7). Surprisingly—because psychogeographers don’t seem to like their practice being described as Romantic—Papadimitriou’s connection to Scarp seems (to me at least) to be quite Wordsworthian:

As I began to learn the basic outline of these topographical details and hold them in my mind, my internal balance would oscillate between the ego’s surrender in the face of a larger entity—the land that contained me—and a desire to gain ownership and mastery of that same entity through cultural production. The idea grew that there was a new form of prose or poetry waiting to be invented, a form of writing sufficient for the purpose of capturing the essence of the broader framework to which I had surrendered, a form that would allow me to re-create the voices and experiences of those Scarp dwellers who came before me as a counterpoint to my own. (8)

I find this to be very Romantic; it reminds me of  Wordsworth looking up at the thunderstorm after stealing the boat, experiencing the sublime and then writing about it later on, trying to capture that experience in words. 

Sometimes Papadimitriou goes beyond thinking about the lives linked to Scarp and begins to hear their voices. “Voices other than the merely historic surfaced on my walks,” he writes (8). These include gangsters buried in concrete bridges, “women long dead glimpsed with the inner eye when I stared through windows into warm-lit rooms passed on freezing afternoons,” “garish tales told by beings that confounded accepted notions of time,” and “the outrage of mossy elementals lingering in relic woodlands”; and another presence, one that spoke with his own voice, “whispering endlessly of a journey I’d made into another unacknowledged aspect of the region several years earlier, and seeking to make sense of that voyage of the damned in the light of what I—or rather, we—now knew” (8-9). It’s not clear to me whether Papadimitriou actually hears these voices—they are the mythic creatures Smith describes—or whether he imagines them; in other words, I’m not sure whether he’s mad or (at times) writing fiction. Of course, real psychogeographers would refuse to acknowledge the binary that structures my response to the voices Papadimitriou hears (or imagines), but I’m not a real psychogeographer. One of the things I’ve learned while reading about psychogeography is that my own impulse is documentary, not fantastical, and that I am happy to confine my thinking to what is, rather than expand into what (really) isn’t. That’s the difference (one of them) between what I want to do and what psychogeographers or, for that matter, mythogeographers do. That doesn’t mean that I can’t learn from their work, or that the suggestions Smith makes about types of walking that can help one relate to the spaces one journeys through aren’t of value; but it does mean that I won’t be imagining voices.

An epiphany (again, this is quite Romantic) led to the writing of this book. In August 2009, after 20 years of walking, Papadimitriou was walking on Scarp near a small forest named Spoilbank Wood: when something happened:

In my mind I linked the wood with points further west such as Dancer’s Hill and Welham Green, places walked through repeatedly over the past few years in wildly varying weather conditions. And reaching out from these places in turn, my thoughts extended to further cardinal points in the broader landscape until a large section of its component features was laid out in my mind like a map. (9)

“However,” he continues, “the details didn’t matter so much as the overall vision, the sense of otherwise disparate elements being bound together in one larger presence” (10). That “overall vision” leads to a sense of fusion with Scarp:

As I approached the stream at the bottom of the valley I could feel the breadth of knowledge I’d gained over the years of walking burst through the strictures placed on me by the daily requirements of living. It was as if the landscape myself was flooding into the front of my mind. I was in a state of ecstatic union with the Middlesex-Hertfordshire borderlands. (10)

Papadimitriou experiences that sense of union repeatedly during the book; moreover, his mythic characters experience it as well.

Papadimitriou is clear about the purpose of this book: it is “an inquiry undertaken in order to systematically ‘feel out’ the presence of my subject matter as it brushes against the consciousness” (11). “Throughout,” he writes, explaining his connection to the voices he hears while walking,

I will reconstruct the ghostly voices I hear while walking on Scarp in an attempt to relate my own story to theirs, to locate my own voice and sensations in the ones that came before me—whether those of a murderer, an animal, a deceived young woman, a master botanist, or any of the other myriad layers of experience that distil over the centuries to create regional memory. The deeper implication is that the world that confronts us through our immediate surroundings is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways not amenable to instrumental reason or economic reductionism. (11)

I empathize with his claim that the land is alive and intrinsically valuable, but I also think that one can come to those conclusions without hearing (or creating) voices. I think one can take that value for granted, as a starting point; one needn’t imagine the voices of a “regional memory”—I’m not sure the land remembers, or if it does, that we are likely to become privy to its memories. In other words, I think documentation is enough, and fiction isn’t necessary. At the same time, sometimes I do talk about hearing the voices of the land, but I think I’m using that expression figuratively, metaphorically, and I’m not sure that Papadimitriou isn’t using it literally. Maybe he is actually hearing voices. I don’t know.

In preparation for writing Scarp, Papadimitriou took 30 walks during the summer of 2011, varying between three and 12 miles. These “served to sharpen my focus on the subject covered here. I wanted to understand the overall structure of Scarp, the transition between its component parts, where and how it begins. As I trudged across fields, through hostile-seeming suburbs and beneath A roads I came to understand that in some respects Scarp was a fiction” (11). That’s a surprising conclusion, and yet Papadimitriou doesn’t return to it, leaving me to wonder what he means.

I intended to separate Papadimitriou’s walking from his memoir and his mythic imaginings, but that’s hard to do. The book’s first chapter, for instance, begins with a fictional story about fatal highway accidents at a place called “Suicide Corner” in the 1950s, but then it returns to the present, a time when the landscape has changed, when the busy roads drown out “a rumour of Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, supposedly buried on Stanmore Common just to the west, behind the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital,” where the victims of those highway collisions were taken (21). That hospital is abandoned, filled with rubbish: 

The sense of something precious—a soft vulnerable humanity interwoven with businesslike yet compassionate expertise—hovers in the silences, sweeping across the dusty cobwebbed surfaces of the medical implements and through the dormitories with their drained radiators and scratched linoleum floors. There is a brushing of dead spikes of buddleia against steel-framed windows. Pigeons scratch and momentarily flutter as they shift on the perches on the roof. These are the whispers of deep time. (22-23)

Deep time is what interests Papadimitriou, I think. Note also the reference to buddleia here. I asked Smith, on Facebook, why that plant is important; he told me that it grows anywhere, that is colonizes waste ground and abandoned buildings, and that it is one of the few plants that does so. It is the return of life, then, to those abandoned spaces, a sign of the vitality of living things. Botanists might decry it as an invasive species, but psychogeographers celebrate the life force it represents.

It is possible, sort of, to separate Papadimitriou’s accounts of his walks from the other layers in his text. His first walk as research for the book was an attempt to find Scarp’s western beginnings: when he does, he writes, “the impact was less dramatic than I had hoped it would be. Scarp first appears—at least in summer—as a swathe of distant full-leafed trees billowing some distance beyond the rooftops of an emergent new suburb” (37). He continues up a canal: 

My excitement grew as my eyes followed a hawthorn hedge on its half-mile journey uphill between two fields before it terminated in a clump of oaks. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a sense of standing on the edge of something improbably grand, of staring up at the emergence of a solid and tangible presence. The next step was to get up there. (38)

He recognizes layers of occupation, of land use: trees that “were clearly residues of a sizable estate that the suburb had been built over,” a grand home that had been a hospital but was not a corporate headquarters: “I was a bit put out finding something as banal as a corporate head office on what felt like a holy pilgrimage” (40). He ends up on a busy road, fully occupied by avoiding traffic: “A small roadside shrine consisting of scattered flowers and a rude wooden cross inscribed with the name Michael did nothing to reassure me” (41). (Busy roads in the UK, as I learned while walking back to Oxford from Blenheim Palace, often have no sidewalks.) Then he walks across a farm where “there is a tall mound of smashed concrete that a farmhand told me was part of the remains of the old Wembley Stadium”: he climbs the pile and sees the cardinal points of the surrounding country (42). Next, he follows a line of electrical pylons along a stream; they add, he writes,

a peculiar intensity to the landscape: this is definitely a place of history and power, one of those Celtic “thin places,” where a sense of something other lurks just beyond the visible. . . . I love to sit by the track crossing below the high-tension cables and imagine that I’m somewhere in the Ukraine, circa 1952, staring up at these triumphant monuments to the electrification of my region. (43)

That leads to a vivid fantasy about being a veterinary surgeon on a collective farm, a fantasy that turns out to be an important part of Papadimitriou’s methodology (and therefore of the as-yet unnamed deep topography): 

Proximity flight: that’s what I call this using of environment to trigger mental journeys to another place and time in which the same stimuli can be found. I find it lifts my sense of the environment out of its codified framework and into fresh possibilities of interpretation, my eyes wiped clean by the resultant defamiliarisation. (43-44)

I’m not sure that proximity flight is really necessary, but who am I to say? If it helps Papadimitriou, fine. I do know, though, that I wouldn’t engage in such a practice on my walks. Perhaps they suffer as a result. I have to acknowledge that possibility.

On another walk, Papadimitriou begins on the north bank of the Colne; he walks “through to a bewildering tangle of canal, river, hatch and ditch,” past “derelict industries hidden in arborial swamp,” “and always, just beyond the trees, a sense of rising land, of Scarp’s face staring down at me” (45). “The whole of the Colne Valley is a naturalist’s heaven and remains curiously overlooked by the London crowd,” he writes: it is home to unofficial bird sanctuaries and rare plants (45). “As evening closed in, orange street lights began to flicker far off on the hills opposite,” he recalls. “A blackbird chuckled somewhere close by and I felt myself merge with the deep peacefulness of the mauve woodlands and the mumbling of the distant M25” (48). That merging is an example of the fusion he seeks with Scarp, and as he relives the day’s walk, he writes, “I passed from sweating exhaustion into relaxation and then surrender, [and] Harefield became a limpid globe of light as Scarp absorbed me into its first station” (48). This sense of absorption or fusion leads to a fantasy of an apocalypse in which the M25 highway ends up “crocheted by read leaves of herb Robert, stars of cow thistle”; he becomes one with the landscape, moving through space and time, through life and death and rebirth until he has become one of his own mythical creatures, perhaps, before he finally returns to himself and unrolls his sleeping bag in “a derelict rutting shed” (48-52). That sense of union with Scarp is the goal of Papadimitriou’s walks, I think, and when it doesn’t happen, he is frustrated and disappointed.

Papadimitrious is a naturalist as well as a psychogeographer (a term he doesn’t apply to himself, but which fits his practice). On another walk, he crosses a ditch where, in 1999, he found a rare freshwater shrimp and then fell into the water (54). (He likes the comedy of his mistakes and accidents.) Then he remembers wandering onto a golf course that “represented everything I resented about privilege and wealth,” all the signs that “signified to me the presence of The Enemy” (56-57). He imagines the life of a wealthy golfer (58-61), and then imagines the history of the golf course, going back to the days when it was Cardinal Wolsey’s palace (61). Again he becomes one with the territory: “all of Moor Park resides inside me” (63). He imagines that he is part of all of the sexual encounters in the neighbourhood (63)—there is a deep sexual loneliness in this text—and that he is in all the attics, inhaling the scent of old newspapers, imagining that “the entire suburb is a groove sensation, a humming colony lit deep in ancient woodland (63-64). After he has has coffee with a friend, he continues walking, noticing details (smells, sights, sounds) and thinking about the area’s past (64-65). What’s interesting about this walk is the way that the past—both his own past and that of the terrain through which he is walking—are layered together, and the way that he uses his imagination as a way of exploring the locale. That fusion he seeks is present here as well; as I noted before, it happens on all of his successful walks.

Papadimitriou describes his apartment, which is chock full of old documents and books, glass jars “packed with artefacts gleaned from walks,” and maps (74). All of that material is essential to his walking (and the as-yet unnamed deep topography). In fact, it was a book that made him begin to take his walking more seriously:

It was a first edition of Walter W. Druett’s The Stanmores and Harrow Weald Through the Ages (1938), bought from a charity shop in Edgware in 1999, that alerted me to the possibility that the supposedly dull, annoyingly smug areas of suburbia I wandered through two or three times a week on my walks actually had their own resonant histories. Gradually the arch-sneer I carried with me whenever I walked was replaced by a deeper contemplation. A sense of stewardship rose in me where before there had been mere cynicism or even jealousy. (75)

Papadimitriou comes to regard Druett as 

an all-seeing tutelary spirit hanging over this whole belt of Metroland strung along Scarp’s southern edge. Eventually I decided that my true role in life—aside from whatever menial job I could obtain given my somewhat chequered past—was to repeatedly visit these ostensibly indistinguished pockets of human life and act as an unofficial recorder, a crow-man picking over the ruins, pulling free the anguished missals, black-bordered death notices and final demands of human life. (75)

He assembles a library of material on Middlesex and Hertfordshire (75). He also learns about and comes to love the flora of the area:

I grew to care enormously for surviving pockets of plant life threatened by development: micro-colonies of woodland species hanging on desperately in the corners of parks or gardens and providing a direct link back to records made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I spent a season photographing exotic and rare species of tree and bush planted by urban and rural district councils in honour of the coronation of King George VI. (76)

“Why I did this,” he concludes, “I don’t know” (76). I think his readers have an idea, though: it’s part of his desire to care for, and to learn about, Scarp’s flora.

Papadimitriou also collects discarded personal documents, taken from abandoned buildings or dumpsters (76). His own “collection of forlorn love letters dating from a failed relationship in the 1990s” is part of that collection: “were I to die suddenly and be found months or years later,” he writes, “the officials bearing the responsibility of informing my next of kin would be hard-put to identify me. And this is as it should be: I’m not Nick Papadimitriou; I am Middlesex” (77). Again, we see that desire for fusion with Scarp:

I pull my region closer, dragging its leaf-fall, scrap-iron, blotting-paper substance home with me after every walk. I spread my finds out on the trestle table and spend long evenings in examination. I hear voices hovering around these tiny fragments of other times, other people’s lives, though what is said and who’s had who I can’t often tell. The thought that anything, any event, should be overlooked horrifies me. The spot where a blackbird died, its neck snapped by a wayward football 1968 is a hallowed place; the ants’ nest you exterminated down by the rose bush 1966 is the scene of a war crime. (77)

The shift to direct address here is interesting: who exterminated the ants? For that matter, who threw that football? Is he remembering events from his childhood? It’s hard to tell. In any case, those emotions are part of his union with Scarp:

At such times my thoughts stretch out beyond my localised identity and enter the broader field of the environment in all its complexity and arbitrariness. Though I have sympathy with Green issues and the Deep Ecology movement, the cherishing I feel is not to be reduced to these political and philosophical viewpoints. (77)

In fact, he prefers “the hard-science papers on ecology I read in the British Library: these well-measured and calibrated records of changes in specific plant communities dating back to the era of A.G. Tansley in the 1920s seem closer to my concerns, fine-detailed witness statements regarding what once was” (77).

Papadimitriou states that his apartment also contains the notebooks where he records his thoughts during his walks (78). It must be quite a collection of stuff jammed into a council flat. What, he asks, is the point of 

all this litter, these spiderweb cardboard suitcases and biscuit tins packed with junk? I always approach my chosen subject from a position of near total ignorance. Examining an Edwardian suburb, a complex network of manorial boundaries or an industrial corridor on the margins of a market town, I’m faced with and threatened by an awful blankness. I hardly know what it is I’m looking at and in spite of all the effort expended on getting to know and understand the deep topography of my region I never seem to gain the accretion of knowledge that would enable me to declare myself an expert. However often I swan in like some dishevelled, smoke-infested Richard Mabey of the buddleia set, I forget the names of plants and have to relearn them every year. I squint short-sightedly at small brown birds flapping in hedges, my lips gibbering as I attempt to name them. Rivers and parish boundaries slide around in my mind and become a squirled nightmare of shifting lines and borders. Names of historic figures slip down through the sluice gate into the main drainage scheme of my mind. It’s a bastard. (78)

Note the sudden appearance of the term “deep topography” here: the methodology is not described until the book’s appendix, and then the description appears in a notebook written by one of Papadimitriou’s fictional characters. In any case, his various failures to remember names of plants or birds or historical figures don’t really matter:

while knowledge of structure or nomenclature can foreground discreet aspects of a place, it can also occlude. Sensory properties of locations encountered while visiting or passed through—a particular moist wind that flaps about the face like a flannel, a singular quality of light remembered but seldom encountered—are screened out all too easily if the primary focus is on the type of cornicing found on a building passed or the names of the building companies that transmuted field parcels into batches of housing back in the 1930s. Which aspect of the experiential field serves as the sine qua non for understanding a place? For me this question has never been adequately answered. (78-79)

There are different kinds of knowledge—factual and sensory (or perhaps embodied)—and the latter might be more important than the former, although Papadimitriou isn’t quite sure. I would agree that both are important, but for me, knowing the names of things is an essential part of seeing them, of allowing them to stand forth from their backgrounds. It helps to know what one is looking at, or hearing, or smelling. The names are important–even if sometimes they escape our memory.

On another walk, Papadimitriou, walking west, sees the ends of two separate eastern sections of Scarp, but feels nothing: “Perhaps its the summer heat or the large lunch I had before setting off but there’s no blood in my brain, no near-frenzied pleasure. I’m left with flat fact and nothing else” (81). The union has failed him this time. His sense of being left “with flat fact and nothing else” seems very significant, given his desire to generate myths and fictions about the places he travels to and through on Scarp. That experience of union or fusion is powerful:

I imagine sometimes that I’m on a powerful and as yet undiscovered hallucinogen, one that dissolves the ego-boundaries that subject and object fuse, so that, were I to ingest this substance while visiting Northwood, I would in some way pass into and become the suburb’s main thoroughfare. It would be a multiplex, transtemporal experience, my usual self reduced to a residual monad blabbering in a conflagration of women, men and the billions of objects large and small that surround them and which define their business” (82)

He would pass through time and space; he would become part of the lives of everyone and everything, living and dead, connected to Scarp. This isn’t just a fantasy, even if the need for drugs for it to happen is imagined. “I call this experience prakrti-laya, a yogic term derived from the ancient Indian Samkhya philosophy,” Papadimitriou writes. It is an “absorption into nature,” even if that absorption is only “pseudo-liberation,” a problem that doesn’t bother him at all:

Being a topographer I’m fatally attached to this earth and when I die I will be bound here, destined to burn-out with the planet at the end of its lifespan. To repeat, I don’t care. Do you? Rather this thin enlightenment than a rationalist state of grace born of a conclusive map of the soul or some other arrogant construct. You can take your concern for “spirituality” and “appropriacy” and shove it, mister! I’m on my way out; I’m on my way in. (82-83)

I’m not sure what he means by “appropriacy”—is it a concern for what is appropriate? for limits?—and I think I’d be one of those he would tell to “shove it,” given my skepticism about this process. Nevertheless, none of this is imaginary for Papadimitriou; he seems to have this kind of experience: the details of the lives of those he sees, now and in the past, he writes, “come to me now both as mass and in individual detail in my prakrti-laya, breaking me so thoroughly that beads of sweat appear on my brow despite the cold. I am a weirdo unwelcome in culturally inclusive public libraries; I sit alone, sopping and slobbering, and read local authority handbooks published circa 1962 on shitty rainy day playing fields” (83). He is willing to risk being socially ostracized in his pursuit of prakrti-laya.

At the same time, Papadimitriou experiences self-doubt, or doubt about his project, quite frequently in the book. On one walk, those doubts become overwhelming:

In the final analysis, what can be said about these endless-seeming streets, most of which I have never visited and where I know no one? Yes, there are cars parked everywhere; perhaps the locals are venal by and large; who cares? And why would I want to come on like some two-bit psychogeographer, a myopic and beaked monstrosity eager to impress with my architectural knowledge, my eye for the telling detail? So often something is delivered up on walks, but not today. (84)

He puts his notebook and his camera away. “There is really nothing to say,” he writes, “so I turn away, my head hung in defeat, and start for home” (84). On the way he encounters a hedgehog with its head stuck inside a plastic yogurt tub: “Leaning forward, I pull the suffocating mask free from the tiny animal’s head. Hi, I’m the region and I love you, I want to say. Is there any recognition, any thanks?” No: the animal curls up into a defensive ball (84), which seems to anger Papadimitriou: “The experience has made my day but there is no thanks at the end of it, no appreciation of my perceptiveness or concern. Such is the way” (85). I found this surprising: why expect gratitude from a wild animal? Isn’t the fact that this encounter made your day enough? Later, he suggests he will never know the territory he walks through any better than his cats, which are “doomed by my caring to spend their whole lives living in the gaps between these slabs of pebble-dashed high-density housing” (102). “We can never truly pin down where our place of dwelling lies,” he writes; “each newly discovered overview of what we call home effectively places it within a new topography, forcing us to redefine what it is we mean when we say ‘I live there.’” (102).

Those doubts aren’t really characteristic of Papadimitriou’s walking, though. When he walks, he sometimes pokes an eighteen-inch Boron rod that he carries into the ground and travels back in time, becoming other people (or so he claims) (99). At Harrow Weald, on the grounds of Bentley Priory, which served as the headquarters for Fighter Command during the Second World War, he imagines—or is “swamped with”—“mental images of wartime Britain that seem bound to this landscape, though perhaps they really originate from films seen as a child” (101). Other voices and images surface as he sneaks through a recently completed luxury estate: “the clicks, whistles, and rattles of flocks of starlings,” “the liquid twitter of finches in the hedgerows,” and “another feathered presence that comes to mind whenever I pass this way. I hear his laughter now as he stares down from his roost upon my momentary pleasures, my thinly disguised conceits” (103)—this is the immortal crow, Merops, one of the mythical creatures he imagines or senses. He thinks about the ringnecked parakeets that escaped from a depot at Heathrow and have become naturalized in London: 

now their numerous offspring have taken over much of the land to Scarp’s south including Perivale Wood. All day the parakeets swoop in and out of the trees with a vulgar whee-whee and other manners alien to the natives but one must be tolerant, I suppose. Viewed from the perspective of planetary time we are all immigrants. (116)

That quotation, in the voice of Merops, Papadimitriou’s immortal crow, might raise the ire of ornithologists worried about the loss of habitat indigenous birds must be experiencing as a result of the parakeet invasion, but psychogeographers aren’t interested in such issues: Papadimitriou (or Merops) reads the arrival of parakeets as an image of immigration.

Like any psychogeographer, Papadimitriou is conscious of his emotional responses to the terrain through which he walks. Walking north through Edgware Way Rough, for example, he reports that “[l]oneliness always descends as I enter this land of severed or simply uncompleted routes, of weeds, pylons and oxidised tin cans” (124). On that walk, he climbs “Scarp’s southern face, passing a snagged tree and near-bald pastures scattered with purple and green docks,” seeing hills and the “blue gasometer at Southall Junction” in the distance. The sight makes him think about all of the people who live there, and how small that population is compared to the natural world that sustains them:

packed between these and Scarp are human multitudes, their dynastic interweavings to complex to map. Our privileged modernity is as nothing in the face of the onslaught of clouds and air, the globules of sunlight sliding across the land’s surface and eating whole postcodes at will. Time moils and folds in on itself under this dancing light. (126)

Once again he imagines or remembers the region’s past (126). But he also remembers things he saw on previous walks as well:

Once, just up by Bury Farm, I found the shrunken dried-out husk of a fox wedged high in a hedge of blackthorn. One of its hind legs had become trapped in a crux of blackthorn and the animal had died there. The fox’s skin was a parchment wrapped loosely about a bleached bundle of bones on which was inscribed a life’s journey from heathery spring through dry-ditch summer to hen-house autumn and motorway winter. I looked closely at its teeth, pointed and yellow beneath the curled-over upper lip, and imagined its slow agony under the sun. (127)

That’s a kind of imagining I can get behind—an imagining based in empathy, in trying to understand the life of another being. It reminded me of the body of an orange cat I found under our old garage. I was trying to fix the floor to extend the building’s life (the operation wasn’t much of a success), and I uncovered the cat, which had somehow gotten stuck under one of the beams and died. I imagined its hunger and its terror and wondered why no one had heard its cries. That imagination is, to me, quite different from the one that claims a fusion with the land or that creates mythical creatures. In any case, that dead fox reminds Papadimitriou of another he saw in an abandoned factory: “There was the same snarling challenge to my skin-wrapped reality bubble. The dead fox lifted me out of the sunlit day and the concerns of the human world into an open field of possibilities” (127). I’m not sure what he means by “open field of possibilities,” but I wonder if he’s not suggesting something beyond the kind of imagining I did when I found that cat’s body. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was; that would be his usual procedure. Again, that’s fine for him, but not something I would do. At the end of that walk, Papadimitriou takes a bus towards home and looks at the other passengers: “I had a feeling of having returned from some transtemporal substratum of the manifest world, as if I had visited the Underlands, those deep, throbbing hive-centres where the energies that underpin the disparate phenomena of the stockbroker belt are generated” (130). The Underlands, as Smith points out in one of his books (the idea is so silly that I didn’t write it down and now I can’t find the reference—a failure of my research methods), refers to the notion, held by some psychogeographers, that there is a world underneath the world we inhabit (at least in the UK). Underland is also the title of Robert Macfarlane’s new book, which appears to be about actual caves instead of imaginary ones. But I digress. My point is, some kinds of imagining can help us understand what we find; others, I think, might stand in our way, or distract us.

When Papadimitriou fails to achieve fusion with Scarp, he feels rejected and hated. On one walk, when that happens, he writes,

The land is beginning to hate me; I can sense it trying to stare me out. I expect sooner or later to be driven from farmyards with stones, dogs snapping at my heels. I know I will be blanked in convenience stores in villages seldom visited by anybody who could reasonably be described as sane. Not that I’ll succumb without a fight. I plan to puncture tractor tyres, kick the foul-breathed farm dogs, and burn down barns in revenge. I will march across this land like a one-man infantry division, my course marked by columns of smoke rising above the treeline as the police choppers chup-chup overhead and snipers conceal themselves in the furze or behind decrepit caravans. (187)

This is, obviously, another fantasy, but those columns of smoke remind me of his imprisonment for arson when he was a youth—hang on, I’m getting to that—and it might connect that experience to his anger at being rejected. Papadimitriou then remembers an earlier, more successful walk, and describes the differences between then and now: 

But that was so long ago and now my world was larger, my knowledge greatly increased. Now I carried whole swathes of the region with me, wherever I walked. I was able to work through complex sequences of places in my mind as I lay in bed at night, linking up the different walks I’d made over the years. The towns visited on my journeys and the tracks and roads running between them stayed fixed, each in its mind-mapped place. There were low chalky corners of fields that seemed charged with an indefinable magnetism that drew me to them again and again. Other places seemingly possessed their own gloomy darkness or, for no apparent reason, felt fetid and miasmic but nevertheless attracted me precisely because of their power to induce such a sensation in me. I knew where badgers had died or caravans rotted away until mere stains of rust were all that remained. (191)

That quotation suggests that knowledge is no guarantee of the experience of union that he seeks; it also suggests that some parts of Scarp have different emotional effects on him. Some parts, in fact, such as the stretch between the Great North Road and the A10 to the east, are impossible to know: that area “remains a stranger however often I walk it. I try to fix in my mind the complex configuration of hills that make up this broad largely unpopulated eastern-central segment of Scarp but always come away from the effort no closer to the truth” (191). 

Despite the failure of that walk, Papadimitriou often experiences his desired fusion with the region:

I felt growing in me a pulsating county consciousness. I could sense sun-heated scraps of corrugated iron beneath which adders sheltered, bin-liners of rags strewn in wastes by remorseless A roads, scentless mayweed on gravel mounds nodding in the breeze by wretched abandoned orchards, languid afternoons spent sitting and sipping white wine in the gardens of big houses on the edge of the Hertfordshire atom towns, generations of owls and cats ruthlessly terminated by strychnine. I became a squirming energy spewing forth rats and roaches, disused fire extinguishers rusting in derelict office blocks in Hemel Hampstead or Stevenage. I roared, a fiery demiurge, below the pantiled bungalows, the pubs decked out in brewer’s Tudor, throwing all this multiplicity into the world in my fury before subsiding back into the humming darkness of the undifferentiated planetary mass. (230)

What is surprising about this experience is that it happens while he is looking at a map of Hertfordshire, not while he was actually walking, actually out on Scarp somewhere.

One aspect of the book, and of deep topography as a method, too, I suppose, is Papadimitriou’s interest in and knowledge of botany. On one walk, he describes the flora he sees:

To the left there was a plantation of young sessile oaks, and to the right, hornbeams. Fresh shoots of fool’s parsley grew by the edge of the track and there were domes of comfrey amidst the rotting logs that lined the route. Colonies of the russet-coloured mushroom Clitocybe infundibuliformis, looking like wind-wrecked umbrellas, grew from tree stumps and at one point I passed a decrepit old farm gate along the top of which sprang the brittle antler-like grey sporophores of Xylosphaera hypoxylon. (232)

Despite his claims to forget the names of plants, he clearly remembers them, at least on that walk. It is one of his last walks on Scarp before writing the book, an expedition to find its eastern endpoint:

Excitement grew in me at the prospect of discovering a precise location that I could declare to be Scarp’s terminus. I set off along a road that dropped down towards the land below. I could see long chains of car lights at the bottom of the hill. Large flocks of crows gathered overhead before flying off to roost for the night. Ahead somewhere lay the town of Ware and the complex intertwining of the Lea Valley and the New River. This narrowing convex tongue of land subsiding down into the river valley felt like a finale. (234)

And yet, this walk ends in failure. He sees a church, and it means nothing to him: “Staring blankly at the plastered interior walls, the artfully patterned brickwork I realised I had no grasp whatsoever of church architecture. In fact, I felt as if I’d learned next to nothing about anything I’d seen over all the years I’d been walking” (236). “It grew colder and I felt defeated by Scarp,” he continues:

Looking back on the way I’d just come I had no sense of the pristine and pure diminuendo I had experienced the previous day. All I could see was a confusing mass of mounds and pinnacles visible beyond the semi-detacheds at the town’s edge. Somewhere in my dulled mind I knew that this was as it should be: Scarp should remain an evasive entity that twisted out of my understanding, slipping free of any notion I had of gaining mastery over it. (237)

His emotional reactiveness to geography is obvious here: on that afternoon, “Hertford seemed particularly cheerless” (237). On the train home, he looks out of the window: “As I stared upwards, both horrified and exhilarated, Scarp raised its bony fingers to claw the blank winter sky and gazed back down on me and through me into deeper time” (238).

On his last walk, on a cold November day, he wakes up in a barn after taking a nap, and prepares to leave. This time, his experience, and his emotions, are quite different:

The darkness descends and map reading becomes impossible. Still, it has its compensations. There is poetry in the lit windows of the town that is my destination, a sense of movement and life in people heading for warm homes. As the walk levels out and I hit a small municipal park, I sit down to eat my hummus and spinach sandwiches and jot down my observations in a notebook. I smoke as I write; the scent of tobacco mingling with the smell of mould drifting from the leaves swept up and piled in the gutter” (245)

However, after accidentally killing a fly, his sense of satisfaction disappears: “Blackness descends on the land and, as Scarp shadows me, a burden draped heavily around my shoulders, I pack away my maps and notebook, rise, and walk on” (246). The sense of Scarp as a burden is fascinating. It is both the area he wants to explore, and the area he is obligated to explore. It is an opportunity for the dissolution of his ego and a source of rejection. It is the place he loves and a burden.

Those walks constitute one layer of Scarp. Another is the story Papadimitriou tells about his life. He begins with an account of his childhood in the 1950s and 1960s: the echoes of the war, and the ongoing fear of another war, which were eventually replaced by television, flared trousers, and more and more cars: 

Now we lived—or so I was assured by my parents and Blue Peter—in an age of decency and safety. However, I never quite believed this and sensed that the dignified rows of houses in my road, with their colourful and welcoming front doors and gaily patterned window sashes, were conspiring to create an illusion of permanence. Their apparent fixity seemed to me to be a lie, the momentary dream of a nameless and ultimately vindictive earth god. (24)

That “earth god” seemed to have taken physical form underneath a metal plate in the alley behind their street: “When I bent down and placed my ear to it I heard indecipherable groans and shrieks rising from some sinister place located deep beneath our front gardens, our ornate wrought-iron gates and tarpaulined Morris Minors” (25). The electrical substation at the end of the alley also “seemed to be a place of unheeded urgency and danger” (25). In fact, the terrain of the neighbourhood told of a different world than the one his parents talked about:

The manhole covers, stern-faced backs of houses and lank weeds spoke of a different language from the one used by the adults who surrounded me in my daily life: they challenged the self-assuming certainty of the events played out in the sitting room at home or on the screen of the TV set that had recently arrived. They were doorways through to something larger, older and darker that lurked behind the narratives of our home lives—something that in my imagination took the form of a gnarled and ancient man made of moss, mud and wood who visited us at night, staring fiercely through the windows as we watched Criss-Cross Quiz. (25)

This seems to have been the first time that Papadimitriou had a powerful emotional response to the land around him, and it also seems to have been the first time he imagines a mythic creature to give shape to that emotional response.

Papadimitriou was bullied at school and took refuge “in a patch of wasteland” near the North Circular Road, where he started fired for warmth (26-27). In fact, he rarely attended school and kept watch for police and truant officers. He played at being an archaeologist, but when he dug in the backyard, he encountered only a concrete pipe: 

Had I been a little clearer in my thinking I would’ve spotted the connection between the concrete pipe at the bottom of my garden and the one in the acre of land where I safely bunked school. Years later I worked out that my garden pipe carried a small watercourse downhill to where it joined the stronger stream that fed through “the sewer.” Our back garden rested in a river gully. (30-31)

Buried watercourses are one of the themes of Scarp, which isn’t surprising, since they are a feature of urban and suburban life. Later, in the early 1970s, he revisits a brook he had visited in happier times, before his mother left his father: “Gone were the sunlit vales of my childhood, replaced by dread: dread in the face of the bullying and poverty; dread in the face of the dismal world with its black arterial roads, damp houses, demands of education and gymnasium” (32). As a result, he resolves to follow that brook as far south as possible. He ends up at a major road: “As I gazed into the sun-starved riverbed beneath the road bridge,” he writes, “I knew I had reached the far end of any world I had ever imagined. The undulating silt, filamentous waterweed and rusted detritus resting on the streambed spoke of endings. This place of dumped paint-cans, hubcaps and bike frames uttered one word only: Terminus” (32-33).

As a youth, Papadimitriou sneered at the suburbs, trying to write poems about “the stultifying tedium of suburban life” (79); but all the while, he admits, 

something else nagged at me. The more folkloric aspects of suburban house design; the way the much derided stockbroker belt was interpenetrated by relics of earlier land use; the glimpses of fields or woods visible through gaps in the semi-detacheds: all these suggested to me an organic interface between the human world and processes of longer and deeper aspiration. (79-80)

He was divided between his desire to ridicule the suburbs and to live there (80). That desire to live there was, I think, a desire to belong, to fit in, to have money (always a crucial social lubricant). He tells a story about hanging around outside the home of a girl he liked when he was at school, taking in the architectural details of the neighbourhood, which, he realized,  symbolized the world that girl inhabited, “with its leather-seated cars and professional self-confidence. Yet beneath all this there ran a mysterious counter-current, as if the older world upon which all this wealth had been lacquered continued to exert its influence” (89). And yet, at the same time, those architectural details “were portals that spanned deep-time, cobwebbed doorways, built into the very fabric of the place, which opened onto ethereal fields and woods, mythological and fabled gods and beasts; the noble and timeless tattoo of plant lore” (89). The desire to fit in was not, it seems, as powerful as the desire to invent mythic beings and understand botany—not as powerful as the pull of what would become deep topography.

When he was 15, Papadimitriou set fire to his neighbour’s house. That’s not surprising, given his interest in fire while he was skipping school, and given the anger he must have felt after being constantly bullied. In any case, that fire led to his arrest, conviction for arson, and incarceration. He was, not surprisingly, afraid of going to jail, and tried to imagine it as a positive experience: 

I was definitely on some strange kind of adventure, a journey to lands barely imaginable. Who knew, the experience might imbue me with certain characteristics I felt were lacking in myself, a degree of hardened masculinity, or a flinty philosophical dogmatism, a geezer’s stolid knowledge of what was what in this world. It might make me attractive to women or provide material for a seventeen-page modernist poem I was already composing. I might emerge from prison a saturnine and moody character, someone driven by a deep-rooted impulse to walk alone over the hills and tramp through the edges of satellite towns leaving nary a trace. (148)

In fact, he imagined it might lead to some kind of fame—but that fame would come from walking over hills and through suburbs and writing, the activity in which he is engaged while making Scarp a reality. Surprisingly, despite the details of his experience in court and while on remand, he says little about his incarceration, only that his jail experience led to “the joy of books, O levels attained in education blocks, a sort of knowledge sometimes useful since” (227). Perhaps his fantasy was accurate, then: perhaps going to jail made him into a writer.

The third layer of the text is Papadimitriou’s interest in imagining mythical beings. Even as a child, as I’ve suggested, he was engaging in such fantasies. Before his arrest, for instance, he has this fantasy:

I’ll sleep in ditches or potting sheds. I’ll claw mangle-wurzels from the obdurate earth and suck on sugar beets behind aluminium silos. I’ll grow hairy and mythic in the stockbroker belt. I imagine the waiting fields, the fine houses throwing their shaded light on tangled woos. I yearn for love in the cool darkness of ancient barns. (156)

But most of his mythic creatures are apart from himself: Merops, the immortal crow; John Osborne, an immortal tramp; and Gloria Geddes, a psychedelic hippie queen. All of these characters carry with them parts of their author. Merops, for instance, expresses the same apocalyptic ideas Papadimitriou imagines: “I don’t know why but I think we all sense something deathly about you these days, something you refuse to acknowledge, an unexamined aspect of yourselves which lingers around you and is beginning to rot and stink” (117). There are similar parallels between Gloria and Papadimitriou. When she’s high, Gloria feels herself at one with her surroundings—animal and vegetable, natural and architectural—and she imagines an apocalyptic future where the skyscrapers collapse (171). On another trip, she presses “a fist-sized piece of Hertfordshire puddingstone” to her forehead and travels “up the latticework of light into the groaning, grinding heart of a glacier as it retreated slowly north over aeons, depositing its boulders and gravels onto mounds of dead sea creatures and thick belts of clay as it did so” (174). Then she imagines the aftermath of the glaciation—trees growing and hominids hunting rabbits—which is followed by the sudden appearance of a railway and bungalows and commuters using jet-packs to travel to work (a different, anti-apocalyptic version of the future): “I felt I was a conglomerate of different times bound by some biological cement into the identity called ‘Me,’” she tells Papadimitriou. “It was very profound” (174-75).

When Gloria is high, she always has the kind of experience of fusion, of egolessness, that Papadimitriou seeks when he’s walking (or looking at maps): 

I would take a soul journey through many states. . . . I became woodlands and river valleys. I flowed, an iron-rusted streamlet, into broad alluvial marshlands. I was plant successions and the spoor of animals, sour green berries and clicking insects in late summer grass. Time hung over the murmuring land as I moved on to endings at oceans, at salt spray and feather-clad wildness. (179)

Gloria’s hippie companions find her stories about these experiences incomprehensible (179). On her final trip with them, she becomes a hornet: 

I remember well the poise and pulsing power of my body, the red warmth of the visual continuum, the flowers glowing like other-worldly beacons, the itch of mites slowly dissolving the chitin of my long deadly abdomen. I wound through tapering purple ribbons of pheromone, bound for something ineffable that was hanging suspended like the sun in its power. It was hornet-life itself. (180)

When she comes down, her companions are angry: she’s been abusive, her “ranting” has ruined their own trips, and they reject her (181). After that, however, she experiences fusions with the environment without drugs, just by walking (182-83). In the end, she tells Papadimitriou, she decides to commit suicide by putting her neck on a railway track in front of a train; that will enable her to return to her “living and creating Mother,” Hertfordshire: “We must now dream alive the past and future, and we must return to the Mother if we want to truly live” (184-85).

I’m not sure what to make of the incorporation of this fictional material in the book. Smith argues that fiction is one of the “non-respectable” forms of knowledge that mythogeographers, or psychogeographers, use (59). That may be—although I wouldn’t want to follow them on that particular path—but at the same time, incorporating fiction into a non-fiction book tends to destabilize the truth claims the book makes, I think. I found myself, for instance, wondering whether Papadimitriou’s account of his arrest actually happened, or if it was a fantasy. (I think it happened, but some small doubt lingers.) On the other hand, Cree writer Harold Johnson’s recent book about the life of his brother, Clifford, brings fiction and memoir together and has received incredibly positive reviews. (I haven’t read it yet, but I want to.) And in Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut mixes memoir (the book’s first chapter, an account of how it came to be written, and his own wartime experiences) with fiction and, indeed, fantasy (Billy Pilgrim’s experiences on the planet Tralfmadore). Perhaps I’m wrong about the effect of mixing fact and fiction together, but there is something about the way Papadimitriou does it that I find disquieting.

For instance, the book’s appendix, “Perry Kurland’s Journal,” which purports to be a notebook written by one of his fictional characters, and found by Papadimitriou in a dumpster, is where “deep topography” is defined. Isn’t it odd to have a fictional character define one’s methodology—the methodology others see as defining one’s practice? Like Papadimitriou’s other imagined characters, there are parallels between himself and Kurland: both are interested in botany, for instance. And Kurland’s description of deep topography (or, since he capitalizes the words, “Deep Topography”) matches Papadimitriou’s practice, as it is described in the rest of the book:

Deep Topography is concerned primarily with the experience of place, not its description. However, it is recognised that a complex and mutually reinforcing relationship exists between these two categories.

Deep Topography: a duty to explore.

Deep Topography is not a problem-solving approach to the world, if that concept is defined purely in terms of increasing or improving degree of instrumentality.

Deep Topography places an emphasis on found items—lists dropped on pavements; letters found in attics of condemned houses; personal papers discarded in skips.

It is difficult to place parameters on what constitutes Deep Topographic inquiry: any formula generated for the purposes of cultural elucidation—even the one expressed in this sentence—interferes with the procedure.

Deep Topography: pieces of rusted machinery stumbled upon in dry grasses by Grim’s Dyke, 1967; a box of telephone components found on Enfield Chase during an undated summer about twenty-three years ago: spread the parts out on the table and try to work out the relations between them.

Deep Topography is a dip down into the valley of the unacknowledged: Suicide Corner, June 1958.

Deep Topography is a transmission across time, confounding the thought that all has been swept away: the Allenstein bird table, 1961-1972.

The accusation of nostalgia cold reasonably be levelled at Deep Topography. However, that sentiment is attained not through absence from one’s home but via passing through the land’s eye.

Deep Topography: a return to home at day’s end and, after the exhaustion, a rising into something that is more than personal recollection: rather, it is the land’s very structure and memory unfurling in the mind. (253-55)

Kurland suggests that Donald S. Maxwell’s 1926 book The Fringe of London is one of his “local gods” (261)—a suggestion that others have attributed to Papadimitriou—and he makes a distinction between “place-known” and “place-unknown” (263). Finding strange places is important, Kurland argues: “It is at these times that the conditioned decades evaporate and a new, an urgent depth is attained” (263). Moreover, on one of his walks Kurland experiences a fusion with the land and a unfixing in time, just like Papadimitriou: 

I tumble down into a culvert lined with hart’s tongue and moss and am knee-deep in the current as it flows back behind me. I walk forward and exit the 1970s. I melt into mods, pass into beards and trad-jazz. I become Saxon and Jute, Roman and Briton. Eddies deepen into swirlings. Cables catch my tired feet and my spectacles slip from my nose. As I fall against the channel carrying the Tramway Ditch into the Silkstream, I end. (269)

I’m sure that psychogeographers or mythogeographers would argue that Kurland is simply an alias; Smith uses many aliases in his writing—I almost missed one of his books because it was published under a different name—and he suggests that playing a role is an essential aspect of mythogeography (152). But I come at this text from a different direction, from my training as a literary scholar, and I can’t help finding it strange that Papadimitriou distances the definition of his practice from his own voice; even though that voice is similar to his own, and has similar experiences, it’s still (ostensibly) another character. This, I think, is an aspect of psychogeography or mythogeography or deep topography that I’m just going to have to accept, as strange as it seems to me. 

So, what do I make of Scarp and deep topography? I like Papadimitriou’s repeated encounters with the same landform; it reminds me of Nan Shepherd’s repeated walking in the Cairngorms. I like the detail of his descriptions of the spaces through which he walks. I like his botanical knowledge—mostly because I’ve learned the names of grasses and forbs indigenous to Saskatchewan myself, I suppose, and yet I’d never thought about incorporating that knowledge into my accounts of my walks. (I’m not as strong on the introduced weeds that constitute almost all of the flora one encounters while walking here, but I could improve my knowledge of them—there are field guides available.) I don’t understand the need for mythic creatures, which probably means I’m missing the point of an essential aspect of deep topography, as well as mythogeography and psychogeography. For me, the real world is fascinating enough, without having to introduce fictional characters. Nor do I expect to experience a fusion with any landscape—that seems to me to be another fiction (although that might testify to my own narrowness). What I ought to do now is return to the article on Scarp in Tina Richardson’s anthology—an article I skipped over because I hadn’t yet read Papadimitriou’s work. Sometimes seeing what someone else has to say about a text can help one clarify one’s own ideas. And I also think that it’s okay if my walking practice departs from the models provided by psychogeography, mythogeography, and deep topography. We all must find our own ways forward, our own methodologies, and if mine are different from those of others, I think that’s probably fine. I walk in a different context, a different space, and in a different way. What could be wrong with such multiplicity?

Works Cited

Papadimitriou, Nick. Scarp: In Search of London’s Outer Limits, Sceptre, 2013.

Richardson, Tina, ed. Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography, Rowman & Littlechild, 2015.

Smith, Phil. On Walking . . . and Stalking Sebald: A Guide to Going Beyond Wandering Around Looking At Stuff, Triarchy, 2014.