All three books are a lot of fun and that is the great, dirty, secret of psychogeographical writing – it is hilariously fun to do as you train your brain to make grandiose statements about people, place and history that you are fairly sure won’t stand up to any great inquisition but look fucking brilliant on paper. We talked about everything as he would lend a helping hand in the garden, editing my first collection of poetry, playing with the assorted cats and dogs, and amusing the long-term boyfriends that might be around. 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. It is an important book, helping us to understand that life and history is on our doorstep and is not another country. Scarp utilizes a decidedly unusual thematic throughout, and it's a mixture of memoir, travelogue, fantasy and psychogeography, all taking place within the 17-mile north Middlesex/south Hertfordshire escarpment .

Up until around the 1770s it was a manor and was owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital from the 15 th to 20th centuries. He is happier in the past and his knowledge of the region's murders, bandits, insanities, and wild lives bring more ecstatic transports. I’m instantly transported back to the studio at Resonance fm feeling the excitement of preparing to go live on air .Up ahead, the second sighting of the Wembley Travelodge is enough to signal the end of the walk as we amble back to Stonebridge Park.

Maxwell, while the second series took a more general if still somewhat esoteric approach to walking in the urban fringes of the capital. 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.Photograph: Rob Greig/Time Out/Camera Press Nick Papadimitriou on the north Middlesex/south Hertfordshire escarpment. Pete seems happy just to go along for the ride too taking snaps with his Lomo Actionsampler camera, although the only action to sample is our plodding along the tarmac. This buried pipe is an unavoidable motif when walking with Nick – it was what guided us on the first walk, it punctuates the traipses in London Perambulator, and appeared again when Nick joined me for one of the expeditions in This Other London. Our walking buddy Peter Knapp was there taking photos and we ended up on an even greater quest to find IKEA meatballs on the Wembley Trading Estate (the meatballs had all gone by the time we got there).

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. 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. He describes the activity of walking and exploring as a cathartic phenomenon worth nurturing, and feels that landscapes shape his mind as he progresses onward. This was an excellent book for a North Londoner, curious about the highways and byways of Edgware, Finchley, Southgate and such places. So when I mooted another walk and various exotic possibilities were floated it seemed inevitable that we’d end up back somewhere in the vicinity of Stonebridge Park and that Nick’s sacred ley line gurgling through a 48 inch pipe beneath the pavement would play a role.In 2009 John Rogers/Vanity Projects made a film about Nick titled The London Perambulator: Afoot in London Edgelands.