As one approaches the heritage core of the city one passes through an event horizon beyond which the city is not so much lived-in as curated. The carapaces of heritage buildings now play host to an industry whose function is to celebrate a stereotyped version of the past, such that the city becomes a simulacra of its original self; a museum to false memory in which even the citizens become tourists.

Scratch under the surface and we may discover a substrata of older narratives, of quietly resonant corners which hide away and hope to be forgotten. There, among the marginalia of city life, the abandoned warehouses and half-deserted streets may yet form the backdrop to certain revelatory moments, certain small epiphanies.

John D:
A phrase which you use [in London Orbital] to describe, I think when you are reflecting on the motorway experience, perhaps the experience of drivers, but I wonder if it's also a phrase which also be applied to walking, where you said, 'Through repetition, boredom becomes transcendence'. And Greenbelt folks know that in the last few years I've been talking about exploring the idea of the everyday and trying to break through the boredom and look for the transcendence within everyday life, and it just occurred to me to ask you the question about whether the act of walking just in our everyday environment - for you, where you live in Hackney perhaps - can help in some way or other to promote what the Situationists proposed as a revolution in everyday life: a different way of thinking about our environment and relating to it?

Iain S:
Yes, I think absolutely, on a very simplistic practical level, the thing I do every single morning is exactly the same walk through a cross-section of Hackney, the path passes through London Fields which has changed dramatically lately, it's become a sort of Portobello Road area, very upmarket, through areas behind Mare Street which are still impoverished, and burnt-out warehouses or travelling families who are living on petrol stations, into Victoria Park and back along a canal. This is like a forty-minute walk. But simply by doing exactly the same walk every day my radar bumping off things confirms my own identity, and if something's changed then I change with it. And also your whole body, all the molecules, are shaken up a little and doing that same walk every single day, quite briskly, really does clear my head, allows the night's dreams and things to settle, prepares you for the writing of the day, and so in a sense I do regard it as a kind of walking meditation, as a kind of reconnection with London in every sense. Practically it might be thought to be be boring because you're seeing the same thing every day but actually it is the everyday becoming transcendent in a very simple way.