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Scarp

Scarp

RRP: £10.99
Price: £5.495
£5.495 FREE Shipping

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Description

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. 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. the half ruined half conserved countryside on the edge of London where I started my hiking career with my dad in the 1950s.

A damp cold day out looking for Monks Park somewhere near the North Circular in north west London as described in Gordon S. Frankly in the driving rain I wasn’t keen on scrambling up a muddy mound to look at ants nests and sought refuge in the underpass. It’s also nice to be out of the rain – the steady drizzle that has fallen throughout the day has hardened into proper raindrops with added attitude. He’s recently released a book that explores the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire Tertiary Escarpment or Scarp with his unique and poetic take to this method.Nick’s is an unique and wonderful voice; and his is the one that has given us this more useful term for our obsessions. 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. So I was delighted to find him there stood beside the Clitterhouse Brook on Child’s Hill (ok, I rang on his door). Show full abstract] ravine where the dense canopy of foliage intercepted the ash and gave us some relief. There’s the nostalgic aesthetic of Standard Definition video tape as opposed to Ultra High Definition (4K) video clips recorded on a SD card, the camera running as it roves across the landscape looking for a subject to settle on.

Nick’s literary gift lies in transforming the mundane and seemingly ordinary suburbs of London into a magical realm. Up until around the 1770s it was a manor and was owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital from the 15 th to 20th centuries.

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. The effect is a heady mongrel mix of The League of Gentlemen's Royston Vasey, TS Eliot's multi-vocal The Waste Land, and Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Alec Guinness plays all the parts. Through the metal grated fence we can see that the Abbey doors have been left wide open – awnings on the balconies flap in the breeze blowing straight through the broken windows. It was a majestic sight to see this suburban stream rushing to meet its mother river before working its way to the Thames at Brentford.

There are a host of others too – a proper ministry of silly walks – but Papadimitriou is his own man. The full lysergic glory of Pinner Hill is revealed in one chapter, the anti-rustic beauties of Edgware in the next. A firestarting episode triggers a journey through another London of cells and prison vans; twisting his motor even tighter. It's the deep immersion in a place, a topography, its history and an observation in to what makes it really distinctive. On a wet day in February I headed out with Nick Papadimitriou and Peter Knapp, picking up the threads of the first walk the three of us did together which ended in the dark of an industrial estate somewhere near Stonebridge Park.The site where our walk had ended 10 years ago was still a patch of rough ground at the end of a mini-industrial estate. 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).



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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