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.

I have simply never read anything like Scarp before, and despite the odd flaw, it remains an astonishing achievement. But as the walk finishes a darker horizon looms, and the close of Walking Home works like a perfect Simon Armitage poem: we are all picked up and turned about without quite realising we'd ever left the world we thought we knew. These don't convince in the slightest as anything more than fictions contrived at a writing desk miles away (as with all "psychogeography" in my opinion - city life would be unbearable if human beings could genuinely tune in for even a moment to the psychic agonies buried everywhere around them), but they are compellingly entertaining, though some of them owe more to TV drama conventions than any spiritual aura of special places.Self's droll psychogeographic adventures are more fun but they lack the sheer Joycean scope of Papadimitriou's ramblings: this is the hard stuff. I still don’t know what I’m going to make from these clips – I’m enjoying the process of rediscovery too much to impose a framework around it. The experience of looking was greatly altered by the haze of snow, steadily falling as my walk began, and continuing for the rest of the day.

Moreover I love the fact that on each page there is a place I am aware of even if I don't know it intimately. 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). When we were schlepping round industrial estates in Park Royal and Perivale I always saw it as a Beat quest. The sections on his arrest for arson in 1977 strike me as bearing a naughty sense of humour underneath the 'tragic' events and I wondered if the whole thing wasn't a tall story. Papadimitriou talks about laying aside knowledge and concentrating on ‘sensory properties of locations encountered while visiting or passed through’, and maybe this was why I (sub)consciously decided against equipment which would aid me in recording my walk (or distracting me from it).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. 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’. I enjoy writing on nature and history that isn’t too technical or academic, and isn’t afraid of an intense subjectivity.

The Royal Waterside development of 265 luxury apartments within a ‘new neighbourhood’ bemusing dubbed First Central (East Village is bad enough but at least it’s in the East – this is neither First nor Central). 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. Here on the edgelands of London he weaves together the story of his walking explorations, with fictional, dreamlike states, to get into the regional memory and gain an understanding of "place".the half ruined half conserved countryside on the edge of London where I started my hiking career with my dad in the 1950s. 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. He worries that mass digital technology has enabled us to atrophy these circuits before we even knew we had them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. Part autobiography, part fiction, part travelogue, and written after decades of hiking and discoveries in and around London, the book focused on the ridge of land to the north of the city's suburbs which Papadimitriou refers to as the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire Tertiary Escarpment. But he also takes a wander through his past, and family, reminiscing about his avoidance of school, prison life and his drug experiences.

From the council flat in Child's Hill, North London, where he has lived for over a quarter century, he sets out on journeys through the urban space that have the velocity and the daring exploratory feel of interstellar voyaging. Most of this is delicious nonsense; Reginald, at least, we know to have once been a real thing as well as a regular object of ridicule for Monty Python's Flying Circus. Nick Papadimitriou wanders around the expanse of "Scarp", a region he has defined to the North East of London. Project Description One Year is a project through which it is intended to construct a daily photographic record of a single view: the view from the artist’s study window at around 8. Papadimitriou was the subject of a documentary film made by John Rogers in 2009 featuring Russell Brand, Will Self and Iain Sinclair, in which he spoke of his practice as Deep Topography.