DOWN AT THE OLD COCK AND PYE

Tom Bolton. London’s Lost Rivers, A Walker’s Guide, 2 volumes. Strange Attractor, 2019.

The first volume of this set was originally published in 2011 and I reviewed it in Magonia HERE. This is an updated edition, largely reflecting the changes that have been made to London's cityscape in the intervening years. Some parts of the routes have been closed off by building development, and some have been opened up as regeneration work has been completed.

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TOWN AND COUNTRY

Merlin Coverley. Occult London. Oldcastle Books, 2017 (2nd Ed.)

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Justin Hopper. The Old Weird Albion. Penned in the Margins, 2017

These are two quite different books, but linked by one theme, the magic, legend and memory of place. Coverley’s book is ostensibly a straightforward guide-book to London, pointing out locations associated with various figures and ideas associated with the history of occultism and magic, from John Dee’s Mortlake (and I’ll have something to say about that later) to Highgate and territories beyond Zone 6. 

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WHAT IS A CHRONOTAPE?

Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing (Eds.). Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016

Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment is a collection of essays concerning the interaction between what we think about ghosts and what we mean by a ghostly location or landscape. It consists of twelve essays ranging from Heidegger to W.G.Sebald and the Whitechapel London of Jack the Ripper to the shadowy landscape of Anglo-Scots borders.
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UNDERGROUND, OVERGROUND, WOMBLING FREE!

Tom Bolton. London's Lost Rivers, A Walker's Guide. Strange Attractor Press, 2011.

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Mark Mason. Walk the Lines, The London Underground, Overground. Random House Books, 2011.

At first sight these two titles might seem to have little in common with the sort of topics we discuss at Magonia. Both are guide books describing the authors' walks through and around London - Bolton's book is specifically a guidebook, Mason's one by implication.

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LONDON CALLING

Simon Webb. Unearthing London; The Ancient World Beneath the Metropolis. History Press, 2011.

We tend to think of the prehistoric stone circles, henges, barrows and leys of the ritual landscape as being confined to the empty parts of the country - the 'Celtic Fringe', or the uplands of Pennines and Peak. But of course at one time all of Britain, including London, was the 'Celtic Fringe' of Europe.
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THE CIRCLE LINE

Merlin Coverley. Psychogeography. Pocket Essentials, 2010.

Louis Armstrong is reputed to have said to a questioner "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know!" After reading this book, that's how I feel about psychogeography. Anything which combines Surrealism, Rambeau, Baudelaire, Robinson Crusoe, Will Self, Situationism and a collection of 1940s and 1950s French political theorists is going to be difficult to define.
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