I then went straight into writing This Other London, and despite a couple of attempts to revive the show it just never happened. We’d been following the course of an underground water main from Golders Green as Nick delivered curbside sermons on how the civic infrastructure of northwest London acted as ‘storage vats of regional memory’.

And there’s the murky December day we went to the former site of Ashford Remand Centre, now HMP Bronzefield named after the Bronze Age settlement that was discovered during the building of the state of the art prison. I enjoy eccentricity, so happily listened to Nick prattle on about Gilbert White, the Woodcraft Folk, and the mysteries of Middlesex. But some of the more abstract flights of fancy in this book such as his imagined 'life as a rook' and the historical fiction, felt like a distraction from what would otherwise have been a more interesting read.In any event, Nick’s inclination is strongly to be alone: the effort of walking the earth is his form of yoga that he says triggers atavistic or future neural circuits designed to incorporate regions and zones directly into the brain’s deep cortex.

AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 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. I look out the window now and see the snow has begun to fall again; the kid in me wants to get out and be in it, to see what its veiling might uncover. Photograph: Rob Greig/Time Out/Camera Press Nick Papadimitriou on the north Middlesex/south Hertfordshire escarpment. He is able to make his walk talk as he does and I have never read a more fully inhabited book of walking.He believes we have some sort of zonal radar system that also operates trans-temporally, enabling us to introject directly into our cortex whole chunks of regional memory at the level of danger - from humans, animals, floods, earthquakes, microbes (particularly) and fire. Strangest of all is a digression into the mind of a highly-intelligent rook named Merops, another everlasting character whose life spans centuries only to die under the wheels of a lorry while pecking at the guts of a freshly killed squirrel. 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. My only demurral is that Papadimitriou repeats the trick a little too often and once he is on the hectic escalator he struggles somewhat to get off meaningfully, ramping up his method while his well-observed concrete specificities crumble away: "I became a squirming toad-like energy spewing forth rats and roaches, disused fire extinguishers rusting in Hemel Hempstead or Stevenage.