I enjoy writing on nature and history that isn’t too technical or academic, and isn’t afraid of an intense subjectivity. Papadimitriou describes his work as deep topography and sets himself a little apart from the Psychogeographer. Here the storage vats are hard-drives of footage shot on a series of walks through Nick’s territory around West and Northwest London – Finchley, Stonebridge Park, Perivale, Feltham, Wormwood Scrubs. The post-cultural tourists who follow in the footsteps of the more famous psychogeographers probably won't stray this far up the Piccadilly Line, and this is perhaps a bit too redolent of the pylon, sewer outfall and business park to get the semi-professional walking set interested. We got as far as a field trip to the Cross Ness Sewage Treatment Works in 2014 but those recordings are on a hard-drive somewhere unedited.

There are sections of personal memoir where the author describes his boyhood, his difficult relationship with his father after his mother’s death. Johnson was right, of course, it is never boring, in its constant flux and flow, and each time I think I know an area well, it surprises me with some new revelation. Little stretches of sublime beauty merge into modern housing estates, pylons and people who would not think about a tree unless it blew down and hit them. 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. Other shapeshifting spirits which appear in the book include Merops the Crow and broken-hearted husband of a witch drowned in a ducking pool in the eighteenth century in a village in the foothills of the Chilterns.We follow him to the Abbey grounds where what appears as a long high wall thickly coated in ivy turns out to be a sequence of derelict buildings, what Maxwell describes as the ‘Home Farm’, that provided the Abbey with food. 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.

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. 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? The city seems to have finally found the Abbey and Nick has found a portal into the past as he suddenly disappears from the pavement through a large gap in the wooden fence where a panel has collapsed into the undergrowth. I opened the book at random and on my second flick of a page landed upon his reference to the Dollis Brook and the role it played in the early years of his life in the 1960’s.But as the walk finishes a darker horizon looms, and the close of Walking Home works like a perfect Simon Armitage poem: we are all picked up and turned about without quite realising we'd ever left the world we thought we knew. 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. It’s not the cheariest of books – the final chapter start

Unlike Sinclair he doesn't simply talk about his mates or the same worn-out literary connections that he's repeating from earlier books.

Mixed in with all this are autobiographical elements including the author’s teenage truancy and pyromania and jail term and his quest to trace members of his dysfunctional family.