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. 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. This is, I suppose, psychogeography and there on the back of the book are favourable quotes from Will Self and Iain Sinclair.

Next up in This Other London by John Rogers, a lighter but similarly intentioned account of ten walks – ‘a plunge into the unknown’ – around fairly random parts of London that were previously just strange names on old maps to the author, a film-maker and good egg. Curling inside his looping journeys across the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment, on which Papadimitriou de-romanticises ruins and tweaks the erogenous zones of gold courses, are other narratives that bend like tiny dimensions inside the bigger shell. I have simply never read anything like Scarp before, and despite the odd flaw, it remains an astonishing achievement. Maxwell’s The Fringe of London, the book that had given us the title of the radio show and had bonded Nick and I in the first place 4 years previously.

Edgelands presents the work of six visual artists who explore and document the wastelands and the neglected environs to be found on the margins of urban living.

It almost feels like an act of ‘Deep Topography’, diving into what Nick describes as ‘storage vats of regional memory’. Some of the prose is beautiful; he has a wonderful turn of phrase, and his observational detail is superb. 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.Nick Papadimitriou veers closer to the topographical delirium of Iain Sinclair or JG Ballard in Scarp: a ramble through his home suburbs of north London that spreads a visionary gleam over the mysterious backwaters of the Northern Line'.