Scarp

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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 then went straight into writing This Other London, and despite a couple of attempts to revive the show it just never happened.

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. 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’.

The old Abbey building apparently being blighted – caught in planning limbo, its inconvenient Grade 2 heritage listing being slowly bypassed by the processes of nature till the structure gradually rots and crumbles. This interview was conducted on a rainy afternoon, in a small café at Golders Green, near Hampstead Heath, in London.

Every couple of years Jason and I, and whatever accomplices we rope in, descend on the increasingly unfamiliar homeland to wrest the secrets from a corner of town not yet explored. I would go down to the brook with my sister and two brothers and we would walk what seemed like miles along the watercourse in either direction. Years of study and dreaming in the spare bedroom of his flat have given birth to a series of fantastic journeys – trips, more like – through the ages of the scarp and into and out of its living and its dead, its creatures and plants, its buildings and routeways, its residents and its passers-by. Papanikolaou also addresses the huge impact that the new LGBTQI and anti-racist legislation has had and how the LGBTQI movement in Greece now has the power to be even more intersectional and more inclusive.In any event, Nick’s inclination is strongly to be alone: the effort of walking the earth is his form of yoga that he says triggers atavistic or future neural circuits designed to incorporate regions and zones directly into the brain’s deep cortex. Like magic, in the last decade or so, the maker movement and psychogeography emerge, and it’s like, “oh, yeah, that”. Papadimitriou has been pitched somewhat as a misfit oddball and instinctual topographer but I sense a degree of sophistication behind this work. The image I had in my head that inspired these thoughts was of the Mill Hill Viaduct in a winter sunset. In 2009 John Rogers/Vanity Projects made a film about Nick titled The London Perambulator: Afoot in London Edgelands.

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. He is able to make his walk talk as he does and I have never read a more fully inhabited book of walking.

Even so Michael Robbins noted in 1953 that, “Cows are still to be seen grazing in the fields, and it is the nearest place to London where the motorist is requested to ‘Beware Cattle Crossing’. Suddenly, the population of the city turns child again, breaking into impromptu snow ball fights, erecting elaborate snowmen in local parks (although the prize for best urban snowman goes to one last winter, constructed atop a toilet discarded on the pavement near my house). Nick had after all dedicated a significant amount of time documenting the rivers of Barnet and that was his major project when we’d first met in 2005.