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Explore second hand bookshops. Buy books on topography – on areas, regions, counties. Study them. Then walk around and see whether you can make sense of the present landscape in relation to the past. This way you’ll get more tension and depth in your engagement with the landscape. Iain Sinclair is best known for his book London Orbital, an account of his walking and exploring the terrain close by the M25. Iain is a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction and has presented a number of films for TV and cinema. I realise the above may not make a full walk, but that area is so rich in history, you could easily add to it if needed. St Chad’s well is (i believe) somewhere in that area between the eastern avenue and billet road near the road that leads to fairlop waters. You can see some little streams in that area if you look on a map.
Mr K decides that from now on he will act as if he were dead, to see how the world gets along without him. For some while he has realised that things between him and the world are no longer proceeding as they did before; before they seemed to expect something, one of the other, he and the world, now he no longer recalls what there was too expect, good or bad, or why this expectation kept him in a perpetually agitated, anxious state.In Scarp, you reveal how overlooked, neglected or liminal spaces can be arenas rife with signs of the shifting psychological make up of society. Over the course of your lifetime what are the most salient changes you’ve seen occur?
I passed beneath the mighty Mill Hill Viaduct in time to see the sun aligned with the apex of its giant arches and approached Totteridge and Whetstone just after sunset. It reminded me that a visit to this area in 2015 to film the situation on the Sweets Way Estate first alerted me to the existence of the Dollis Valley Greenwalk and I vowed to return to do the walk. And over six years later here I was. Like Luke Fowler in his art film portraits, Rogers refrains from providing a straight account of Papadimitriou’s life, instead leaving it to the viewer to piece together biographical fragments. The London Perambulator has a grunge aesthetic, including shaky camera-work and with the outdoor shots filmed from a walkers’ perspective, so there are no panoramas or aerial shots. Intercut into this are talking head sequences of Papadimitriou’s three most famous friends speaking about him and his activities. The talking heads are media personalities Russell Brand and Will Self, complimented by writer Iain Sinclair. Self and Sinclair are shot in their homes, whereas Brand appears to be reclining in the offices of his Vanity Productions company. There is the odd shot of Papadimitriou in his flat, but mostly he is filmed outside, sometimes accompanied by Will Self. There are variations in sound quality, with the audio on the Brand segments being superior to everything else. Brand’s Vanity company produced The London Perambulator, Rogers works there and obviously studio equipment is generally superior to its portable equivalents. That said, the sound is acceptable throughout the film, and the changes in its quality are simply a part of its grunge aesthetic. In the interests of clarity, I also need to declare here that there are a couple of projects I’ve been developing with Rogers and Vanity for some time; so if anyone wants to make accusations of nepotism, I should be included in them for blogging about this film! It’s been a strangely comforting and therapeutic experience. It could be the memories of a simpler time, before ‘ the virus’. Also a period when I was very much learning how to make a documentary (a process that never ends). There’s the nostalgic aesthetic of Standard Definition video tape as opposed to Ultra High Definition (4K) video clips recorded on a SD card, the camera running as it roves across the landscape looking for a subject to settle on. There’s some good stuff in those out-takes that didn’t make the final cut that premiered in the East End Film Festival at The Whitechapel Gallery in April 2009. There is deep tradition of writing about landscape in Britain , from the Lake Poets to the psycho-geographers of more recent times. To what extent are you conscious of literary tradition when working and do you think there is something particular to Britain – perhaps our class-bound society – that leads us to re-imagine our surroundings?Walking and writing are as old as the hills, and the writing of walking not much younger. Not only did those feet in ancient time tramp almost all of Britain, but someone was also there to write it down. We haven't stopped. There is barely a scrap of ground that hasn't been walked into words. And now two more journeys hike over hills into this sodden summer, a good year to prefer armchair travel to the real thing perhaps, walking books to boots. 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 final section of the book, supposedly a journal handed to him for annotation by a friendly rook (!) is another tall story. Perry Kurland's journal is a sequence of what are effectively modernist prose poems that hover between profundity and the hilarious. I really hope you don’t mind this suggestion – and sorry again if you’ve already covered it and I haven’t found it yet! At first glance you might take this for one of those quirky ‘walking memoirs’ that are fairly popular right now; the bright, handsome cover and accompanying blurb suggest something which occupies a similar territory to Roger Deakin or Rebecca Solnit; something that wouldn’t look too out of place amongst the Caught by the River collective, perhaps. I don't write any of this with disdain - all of the above are things I enjoy reading. I enjoy writing on nature and history that isn’t too technical or academic, and isn’t afraid of an intense subjectivity. But what I wasn’t prepared for was that this book would combine all that stuff with one of my other pet interests which is books that are, for want of a better description, really quite weird. Papadimitriou describes his work as deep topography and sets himself a little apart from the Psychogeographer. I was sceptical about the need to do so at first, but now I think I accept it a little more. He takes a sort of amalgam of old Ordnance Survey atlas, decommissioned guide book prose and personal recollection, and rewalks the landscape with no preconception. He accepts its stories, often it's casualties without judgement and most importantly without recourse to human sciences or politics to justify the links he makes. 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 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.