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Displaying 1 - 12 of 24 reviews
September 29, 2014
Scarp is a document of ‘deep topography,’ an offshoot of psychogeography caught up with memory, and the material dredged up by certain places with traumatic or nostalgic associations—instead of being shaken into a new awareness of the urban landscape, this discipline seems more masochistic and maudlin. Nick explores the region in which as a nihilistic teen he committed arson and was taken to prison, weaving his experiences into a poetic thicket of descriptive prose that includes strange drifts into fanciful historical fiction, accounts from curious figures in his past (including the hippie girl we’d all love to meet), and a trainspotter’s account of the area’s (deep) topographical make-up. Nick’s practice is too involved for this amateur psychogeographer. I will settle for losing myself in alien surroundings over the navelgazing torment involved in this lark.
April 15, 2023
Weird, leftfield, and slightly eerie, almost like a poetic version of the wasp factory - slipping into other minds and mini-stories that all blend into one larger and semi-somnolent awareness.. Lilting and dreamlike but also sharply observed, with a deep love for the location and years of exploration and research that weave through every scene.
November 3, 2021
Deep topography and ‘conscious walking’. A bit of a a ramble by fairly interesting and entertaining offshoot of psychogeography.
abandoned
April 19, 2014Yes, there's some lovely bits here about the beauty of the disregarded, overgrown lands on London's margins, and the dubious charms of outer suburbia...but there are dozens of writers who can do that stuff, and too often this feels like a Pooter-style pastiche, Diary of a Psychogeographical Nobody. Sentences frequently collapse into bathetic details, and the attempts at ventriloquising local residents past and present would be embarrassing as creative writing class exercises. Ultimately, this is a genre in which you need to feel the writer makes a good walking companion, and for me, Nick Papadimitriou does not pass that test.
May 20, 2017
I was recommended this book by a librarian friend. It is a strange book, recording a journey along the escarpment of land around the north of London (much of which is familiar to me). The author also reviews his past, and family, reminiscing about his many misdemeanors. Some of the prose is interesting, and his observational detail is superb (often too detailed for me). It does get very surreal at times, and I lost interest later on, although I did finish it (I always do).
January 20, 2018
The subject matter of this book is something that appeals to me a lot. It's the deep immersion in a place, a topography, its history and an observation in to what makes it really distinctive. 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. 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. The book was much more fascinating when he was out exploring the landscape and nature of the North London fringe but sadly this seemed to be only a small proportion of the book.
March 7, 2019
Much better at being psycho than addressing geography. Was the latter just an excuse to be self-indulgent with the former? Was it all embellished anyway? Were the flights of fancy with outlandish characters just padding or did the author think he was digging deep with this imagined reality? Difficult to say, but leaving me with so many questions after writing about somewhere so ostensibly humdrum is a success of sorts.
Read
September 29, 2020How we should view the ragged edges of the city.
January 15, 2015
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.
Like I said, this purports to be a book about nature. The chapters are arranged as a series of walks in the vicinity of what the author refers to as the ‘Scarp’, otherwise known as the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment. An elevated region on the very furthest outskirts of London, just beyond what was once called ‘metro-land’, it’s the kind of place which tends to go entirely overlooked. A mix of brownfield sites and golf courses and commuter-belt housing and broken patches of woodland, to the author it is home turf, and the site of walks he has made and re-made many times over the years.
The book is about the land but also not about the land. It is, as you might expect, all about him; but the author remains a strangely elusive figure throughout. There are sections of personal memoir where the author describes his boyhood, his difficult relationship with his father after his mother’s death. He tells about how he burned down a house and, after confessing to the police, was sent to prison. We’re told a great deal about this arrest, but much of his life remains unclear; he is not especially interested in detailing his time in prison or afterwards. There are a few hints at spells of mental illness, but nothing much is said about work or family life, despite the intimate nature of that which he does bring up. It is all quite mysterious.
I remain curious because the fantastical aspects of this book are fascinating, and by far the best thing about it, and I wonder where it all comes from. The rambles across the landscape trigger something akin to an out-of-body experience in the author’s narration. Sometimes he becomes part of the landscape, some aspect of ancient geology or plant life informed by his rich knowledge of wild flowers and traditional herbology. Other times he trips into the body of another person and tells their story — that of a woman who falls under the spell of a cult leader; an obscure car accident at ‘suicide corner’; a tramp who is actually the reincarnation of a murderous magician who achieved immortality back in the eighteenth century. 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.
I don’t feel I am doing a very good job of describing this stuff, but it is extraordinary. Some of it is clearly based on the author’s own research and wide reading into the area, but other passages seem entirely imagined, and by the end I had pretty much lost interest in discerning the dividing line between the two: I was entirely absorbed in the world of the book. At times I was reminded of Iain Sinclair, but there’s none of the mania for bibliographical citation that I sometimes find an obstacle in that writer’s work. The style is also reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s work after ‘Crash’ and ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, but there’s nothing of that cold, surgical air here: this is deeply heartfelt stuff, sometimes rich to the point of absurdity. 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.
How something quite so odd got published by a relatively unknown figure I am not sure. Ultimately, no comparison will suffice: this is one of those rare and peculiar books which will sit uneasily alongside pretty much anything else on the shelves. It is quite unique.
Like I said, this purports to be a book about nature. The chapters are arranged as a series of walks in the vicinity of what the author refers to as the ‘Scarp’, otherwise known as the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment. An elevated region on the very furthest outskirts of London, just beyond what was once called ‘metro-land’, it’s the kind of place which tends to go entirely overlooked. A mix of brownfield sites and golf courses and commuter-belt housing and broken patches of woodland, to the author it is home turf, and the site of walks he has made and re-made many times over the years.
The book is about the land but also not about the land. It is, as you might expect, all about him; but the author remains a strangely elusive figure throughout. There are sections of personal memoir where the author describes his boyhood, his difficult relationship with his father after his mother’s death. He tells about how he burned down a house and, after confessing to the police, was sent to prison. We’re told a great deal about this arrest, but much of his life remains unclear; he is not especially interested in detailing his time in prison or afterwards. There are a few hints at spells of mental illness, but nothing much is said about work or family life, despite the intimate nature of that which he does bring up. It is all quite mysterious.
I remain curious because the fantastical aspects of this book are fascinating, and by far the best thing about it, and I wonder where it all comes from. The rambles across the landscape trigger something akin to an out-of-body experience in the author’s narration. Sometimes he becomes part of the landscape, some aspect of ancient geology or plant life informed by his rich knowledge of wild flowers and traditional herbology. Other times he trips into the body of another person and tells their story — that of a woman who falls under the spell of a cult leader; an obscure car accident at ‘suicide corner’; a tramp who is actually the reincarnation of a murderous magician who achieved immortality back in the eighteenth century. 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.
I don’t feel I am doing a very good job of describing this stuff, but it is extraordinary. Some of it is clearly based on the author’s own research and wide reading into the area, but other passages seem entirely imagined, and by the end I had pretty much lost interest in discerning the dividing line between the two: I was entirely absorbed in the world of the book. At times I was reminded of Iain Sinclair, but there’s none of the mania for bibliographical citation that I sometimes find an obstacle in that writer’s work. The style is also reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s work after ‘Crash’ and ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, but there’s nothing of that cold, surgical air here: this is deeply heartfelt stuff, sometimes rich to the point of absurdity. 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.
How something quite so odd got published by a relatively unknown figure I am not sure. Ultimately, no comparison will suffice: this is one of those rare and peculiar books which will sit uneasily alongside pretty much anything else on the shelves. It is quite unique.
December 18, 2016
It's a long time since I felt the need to write about a book I'd read on here, at least as directly as this - but perhaps it's something I should do more often. The irony of reading "Scarp" in the middle of Glasgow, while the city moved quickly to take advantage of unexpected sunshine wasn't lost on me. George Square glistened in the light, pale skinned, blinking office workers emerging for their lunch break. Spending it with trouser legs and skirts rolled up, shades on while feet away, propped against a huge marble monument and just a little way from the huge metallic Olympic symbol erected for the summer, I sat devouring this curious book. In some ways, it's the book I wish I could write - part personal reverie, part hymn to the places around me. It delves deep into the landscape, and where current descriptions won't suffice creates a new map - you won't find "Scarp" identified anywhere I'm certain. But that's where this book plays its master stroke - we all invent our own maps and landscapes, but some of us do so more consciously than others. So "Scarp" is Papadimitriou's name for a mass of high-seated land which joins Chiltern Ridge to Lea Valley in a broad sweep across his beloved Middlesex. Buried in it are streams, lanes and byways which he has walked - often in dark times with all the associations they carry - to make sense of his county and his world.
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.
Ultimately, "Scarp" is unresolved. We never get the end of the autobiographical thread which winds through the book, explaining perhaps why the author took to the edgelands and the streambeds - nor do we get to achieve the idea of "Scarp" as a whole. But that's because Papadimitriou hasn't yet managed that either. And it's likely he never will. There is both a luxury and a a risk in writing about such a specific and rarely trodden area. 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. 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. This is the landscape challenged and personified, but described in the loving detail of a botanist's catalogue. It's nothing short of a remarkable piece of work in that respect.
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.
Ultimately, "Scarp" is unresolved. We never get the end of the autobiographical thread which winds through the book, explaining perhaps why the author took to the edgelands and the streambeds - nor do we get to achieve the idea of "Scarp" as a whole. But that's because Papadimitriou hasn't yet managed that either. And it's likely he never will. There is both a luxury and a a risk in writing about such a specific and rarely trodden area. 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. 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. This is the landscape challenged and personified, but described in the loving detail of a botanist's catalogue. It's nothing short of a remarkable piece of work in that respect.
April 9, 2014
This was an brillant and very strange book which for me turned into a multi-media experience where I traced the author’s wanderings on Google Streetview and Streetmap and also delved into the stories behind some of the nature writers, sewage farms, murders and road traffic accidents. I also ended up listening to some 1970s prog rock ( Kevin Ayers, Egg ) which was mentioned in the strange story of the Gloria Queen of the Psychedelic Ancients of Lower Saxony cult. 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. 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. Although fanciful, it all adds up to very fresh way of looking and history and landscape of the high ground Scarp of the defunct county of Middlesex - a take on psychogeography which Nick Papadimitrou has termed Deep Topography.
April 16, 2016
This is a strange book in so many ways, it a a physical journey around the escarpment of land around the north of London. But he also takes a wander through his past, and family, reminiscing about his avoidance of school, prison life and his drug experiences.
Some of the prose is beautiful; he has a wonderful turn of phrase, and his observational detail is superb. It does get very surreal at times, where the book reaches some of the darker depths of his mind. The writing reminds me of Ian Sinclair, in some ways, complex, layered and esoteric. The last one I read I could not get on with, but may have another go soon.
Some of the prose is beautiful; he has a wonderful turn of phrase, and his observational detail is superb. It does get very surreal at times, where the book reaches some of the darker depths of his mind. The writing reminds me of Ian Sinclair, in some ways, complex, layered and esoteric. The last one I read I could not get on with, but may have another go soon.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 24 reviews