Chronicler of the suburbs, Nick Papadimitriou

After my recent fascinating dialogue with painter Deborah Burnstone, who is as interested in roads and highways as me, she suggested I have a look at the work of Nick Papadimitriou. This walker, interpreter, thinker, writer, poet, documentor, mapographer... is fanatical about the study of his home perimeter of the North London suburbs. In a recent newsnight film, we are invited into a world of subterranean suburban rambles. All the arty words of liminal spaces, hinterlands, psychogeography all come up in Nick's work, but you don't hear them. He is not interested in being cool about his work he just does it, in a genuinely honest open way. His attention to the ignored, the aimless openness to anything underfoot, his felt sense of the overlooked is deeply touching and borders on an other-worldliness without referring directly to spirituality. Nick Papadimitriou's new book Scarp, published by Hodder and Stoughton will be available in April 2012.