Walk with Nick Papadimitriou to Uxendon Hill

Here’s a vid I hacked together from the snippets of footage I shot on the walk I did with Nick Papadimitriou from Child’s Hill to Uxendon Hill for Chapter 6 of This Other London. The walk was on 21st December 2012 – the day some people believed the Mayan’s had prophecised the world would end.

I’ve used some extracts from the audiobook version and made a couple of bits of soundtrack.

In a couple of places this walk crosses paths with the second ever walk I did with Nick back in 2005 on the day after the failed bomb attacks two weeks after the 7/7 bombings. The footage I shot that day became the first videos I made with Nick that later I developed into the feature documentary The London Perambulator.

In this video below (1 minute in) you see Nick outside St Michael’s Church in Cricklewood in 2005 – repeated above in 2012

Scarp Video

Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou - video #1 from fugueur on Vimeo.

Here’s a video I made for Nick Papadimitriou’s book Scarp, published on 21st June.
Great going out following Nick around with a camera, first time I’ve really done this since the last walk we filmed for The London Perambulator in December 2008 (the Ventures and Adventures videos were just a side-product of those walks).

Scarp really is a unique book, like Richard Mabey had scoffed a load of magic mushrooms after writing The Unofficial Countryside, then read a shed full of experimental poetry and studied tank warfare and the tactics used at the Battle of Stalingrad. Or if Robert Macfarlane had gone to Borstal instead of Cambridge, then roadied for a prog rock band from Barnet and found himself a job mopping the floor of a brothel in Gdansk before finally settling down in a tower block in Middlesex.

But I’m not sure that goes even half way to fully describing what the book is really like.

I’ll post a couple more videos from the day out on Scarp.

Look out for a Time Out feature on Nick next week.

london

Scarp map

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).

Scarp map

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