Scarp

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It does get very surreal at times, and I lost interest later on, although I did finish it (I always do). That walk was almost 10 years ago to the day, 22nd July 2005 – the day after the failed second attack on the tube network; there was a tangible tension on public transport heading out to our rendezvous at Golders Green, the bombers were still on the loose somewhere in northwest London where we were walking. Stevens, he saw cassocked monks wandering the meadows and some at work “building a new rick from the new-mown hay”. The rambles across the landscape trigger something akin to an out-of-body experience in the author’s narration. 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.

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. 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. 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. This is, I suppose, psychogeography and there on the back of the book are favourable quotes from Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Home from the school run, put the coffee pot on and press play on the CD player without looking to see what’s loaded.To commemorate this common miracle, I decided to take a stroll along the river, starting at the southern side of Tower Bridge, and finishing at Vauxhall Bridge, a walk of approximately 2. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. There are sections of personal memoir where the author describes his boyhood, his difficult relationship with his father after his mother’s death. The thrill of this is palpable in his writing, and having felt this same heart-leap at a sudden turn of a corner and never quite expressed it, it gave me huge pleasure to see it described in print.

Instantly we were in a cooler, dark green environment where the effects of Montserrat's active volcano were less immediate. 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.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. It’s defiantly unfashionable, exuberant and freewheeling, linking together apparently unrelated artefacts and events and nature and the living and the dead in a dense web of meaning. But "Scarp" is a life's work, a labour of intense love for the landscape and a tribute to the land which sustains us, which we walk in difficult times, which links up homes, prisons, hospitals and bus stops. 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. The first series examined a number of early-twentieth-century 'rambling' books which explored the suburbs of London through the eyes of forgotten authors such as S.