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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. This buried pipe is an unavoidable motif when walking with Nick – it was what guided us on the first walk, it punctuates the traipses in London Perambulator, and appeared again when Nick joined me for one of the expeditions in This Other London. Opposite Royal Waterside are the locked gates to the Abbey so we move down the road to survey the site from the grounds of St Mary’s Church. I’m totting my camera – experiencing things mostly through the filter of a fold out screen, following Nick like this is a disorientating experience – I never know where I am or where I’m going, it doesn’t really matter. I look out the window now and see the snow has begun to fall again; the kid in me wants to get out and be in it, to see what its veiling might uncover.

Although I hadn’t told him of my spontaneous decision to walk one of his beloved rivers of the London Borough of Barnet, in his role as genus loci of the area, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d sensed my intentions.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. Between 2009 and 2011, Papadimitriou co-hosted, with John Rogers, two series of a radio show on Resonance FM entitled Ventures and Adventures in Topography. Papadimitriou rambles through the landscape and through history – in one long sequence an immortal rook visits incidents and people over several centuries, reporting their stories in the first person.

What he has written here is one of the best books on `other walking' we are ever likely to read - it is up there with greats like Careri's `Walkscapes', Shehada's `Palestinian Walks', Stilgoe's `Outside Lies Magic', Whitehead's `Walking To Work' and Graham's `The Gentle Art of Tramping'. The first walk to record the field recordings that constituted half the programme would have been around the same time. Long arms of brightly tiled pedestrian tunnels feed into a large central rotunda gathering the echoes of footsteps and conversations into an aural soup.Up until around the 1770s it was a manor and was owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital from the 15 th to 20th centuries.

Mary’s to the white traffic noise of the North Circular Road, which along with the building of Park Royal Station in 1903, had sounded the death knell for this rural idyll.

I enjoy eccentricity, so happily listened to Nick prattle on about Gilbert White, the Woodcraft Folk, and the mysteries of Middlesex. This article explores the emotional dynamics underpinning his work in light of four themes: the covert Hedonistic gaze, scenarios involving jealousy, staging the ineffable jouissance of the Other, Eros for women deprived of physical sensation due to a deeply-rooted fear of otherness, and the recurring deaths of feminine beings assimilated with preventive murder in the name of virginity and sterility.