This is one of four beautiful maps in SPB Mais’s book published in 1939 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the London County Council – the central shaded green area being the area covered by the LCC.
The publication of This Other London in Australia today made me think of these maps that I stuck in my journal when I was preparing to leave Sydney in 1997 after 2-and-a-half years. They show some of the streets that played a significant part in my life in Sydney, the places I’d lived, the various routes I took up to the library at Bondi Junction where I used the computers to write a screenplay set in a Hackney squat.
I haven’t been back to Sydney for over 10 years now but mentally I still take a wander along those lanes between Tamarama and Bronte then up to Charing Cross and back to the Waverley Oval.
Met Nick Papadimitriou tonight to discuss the video we’re shooting to tie in with the publication of his epic deep topographic tome, Scarp (published by Hodder and Stoughton this June).
Nick drew this map in my notebook to indicate some of the places where we could film to capture the key elements of the North Middlesex Tertiary Escarpment (hope I’ve got that right).
Somehow going to make a video from these notes
I was eagerly awaiting the post today – expecting an advance copy of Russell Brand’s brilliant autobiography ‘My Booky Wook’. Among its many virtues I think it will enter the canon of great London books – one particular passage where Russell leads a troupe of homeless men down a windswept Oxford Street in search of heroin put me in mind of a latter day Patrick Hamilton.
But along with said book came a slim brown envelope postmarked KT TW & GU. Inside a wonderful hardback Bartholomew’s road map of Britain ‘The Spotless Way’ – undated but most likely early 1950’s. Also a torn page from a book with a picture on one side of an old man of the road (the kind of character that Nick talks about in the video below) a man fused with his environment. On the reverse of the page a poem by William Barnes (the man in the picture?) ‘Aunt’s Tantrums’ written in rich dialect: ‘Why ees aunt Anne’s a little staid/ But kind an’ merry, poor wold maid!’. Also a leaflet advertising ‘Africa Contemporary Record – Available July 1975’.
No note, no name, no return address. I know nobody in that part of the country from where this was posted. 
The resonance of the contents is multiple and profound. The Road Atlas and poem in dialect directly relates to a documentary idea I’m developing and yesterday got a call saying that I had a meeting to pitch the idea to a Tv channel. The title of the poem – I have an aunt gravely ill in hospital. The photo relates to the conversation I had with Nick last night.
Who could have sent it? A reader perhaps?
Last night I finally ventured inside Nick Papadimitriou’s ‘Deep Library’. I filmed an hour of Nick talking about his collection, a sample of it you can watch here. We’re polishing off a treatment for a full-length ‘Deep Topography’ documentary that we’ll shoot throughout next year. Please leave comments – we like them.
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