Scarp

2013 | Science & Mathematics

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it's difficult to define exactly what this book is: it mixes autobiography, local history, geology; it is walking guide, poetic vision and pure fiction; all coloured by a slight edge of, if not madness, then pleasing eccentricity. Read the rest of this review by Gayle from our Westfield White City branch here.
Synopsis
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. Nick Papadimitriou has spent a lifetime living on the margins, walking and documenting the landscapes surrounding his home in Child's Hill, North London, in a study he calls Deep Topography. Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp.
Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a vast yet largely invisible presence hovering just beyond the metropolis, Scarp is a vast storehouse of regional memory. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. Scarp captures the satisfying experience of a long, reflective walk. Whether talking about the beauty of a bird or a telegraph pole, deaths at a roundabout or his own troubled past, Papadimitriou celebrates the poetry in the everyday. His captivating prose reveals that the world around us is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways that the trappings of day-to-day life lead us to forget, and allows us to re-connect with something more authentic, more immediate, more profound.

A review by Gayle from our Westfield White City branch
"Sometimes when I am in certain frames of mind, particularly on very hot days around the North Circular, I can feel time radiating off of pre-molded concrete lintels." Utterances like this are why I love Nick Papadimitriou. Admittedly, I'm the sort of person who spends her days off wandering aimlessly around suburban North London, taking in the intangible magic of the North Circular or the contained wilderness of the New River Path, but even if that's not your idea of a good time, there is still so much to like about Scarp, a poetic meditation on a ridge of North London edgeland.
Papadimitriou describes his work as "deep topography" (emphatically not psychogeography): he has spent decades consciously walking the North London hinterlands, receiving and recording the land's psychic resonances and unknown histories, and building his Deep Library - a vast archive of maps and books (some bought in second-hand bookshops, some serendipitously stumbled upon in suburban skips) currently housed in the spare room of his Child's Hill council flat. As might be expected from such a decades-long obsession, it's difficult to define exactly what this book is: it mixes autobiography, local history, geology; it is walking guide, poetic vision and pure fiction; all coloured by a slight edge of, if not madness, then pleasing eccentricity.
You'll recognise some of this territory from Richard Mabey, Iain Sinclair, Will Self, but the ground Papadimitirou treads is all his own. It's a pleasure to be invited along for the trip.

Nick Papadimitriou (Author)