The Royal Waterside development of 265 luxury apartments within a ‘new neighbourhood’ bemusing dubbed First Central (East Village is bad enough but at least it’s in the East – this is neither First nor Central).

Jerrold had guided me when I walked out from Sudbury Hill over Horsenden Hill through Perivale to Hanwell and in the course of that walk had teased me with descriptions of early 20th Century Hanger Hill and Twyford Abbey. I’m trying to get below the surface into something that’s moving in my mind as much as in the landscape,’ he says, which doesn’t say a great deal and is therefore as neat a summary of his obscure methodology as you are likely to find.

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. This bridge instantly triggered memories of walks with Nick Papadimitriou, starting in the summer of 2005, that often took us over this metal bridge with the Hendon Way pulsing below and views of the distant high ground that would later become the subject of Nick’s celebrated book, Scarp. Shielding our faces with our hands, we - two Montserratians, Heidi Shea Osborne, Rootsman, and I - walked quickly to the edge of the forest and dropped down into Soldier's Ghaut, a steep .

We never get the end of the autobiographical thread which winds through the book, explaining perhaps why the author took to the edgelands and the streambeds - nor do we get to achieve the idea of "Scarp" as a whole.Somehow despite slow encroachment this corner of London retains a left-behind feel, an eldritch zone where the fences are there to keep something in as much a keep people out. But what I wasn’t prepared for was that this book would combine all that stuff with one of my other pet interests which is books that are, for want of a better description, really quite weird. I’m instantly transported back to the studio at Resonance fm feeling the excitement of preparing to go live on air . The wicking properties of his coat are as important as the comforts offered by comparing his trails and trials to Odysseus or Sir Gawain . New fences have been erected, diggers chunter round on a large adjacent plot, the old bus is still parked at the end of a long driveway.