The archive

It's probably fair to say that I've read far more this year than for the last few. This is a strange situation for me: I've always had numerous books underway, piled haphazardly in different places and awaiting my attention.

Imagine being known only by your least appealing attributes... For most of us that's not a big speculative leap: there's a decidedly British ability to fall back on self-deprecation and we're all aware of those aspects of our character we regard as the least prepossessing.

It's fair to say that I've never coped well with nature. As a child of a New Town, my forays into nature weren't manifold. A tentative attempt to help my grandad in his steeply sloped Worcestershire garden usually ended up with him frustrated and…

Walking the suburban margins of London I have stumbled - sometimes with surprise - across a range of housing estates. The explosion in population in the outer reaches of the capital travelled through the 20th century like a shockwave.

I first encountered Tom Bolton's writing through two small but rather wonderful books, both about aspects of London which fascinated me. The first of these surveyed the familiar territory of the 'lost rivers' - a subject which I've happily wittered…

UPDATE: You can now buy Adverse Camber on Amazon UK and Amazon USA. Over the past couple of months, I've revisited the posts I wrote here about the incomplete A13 walk which I took back in 2015/16. They felt a little self-indulgent, but were in…

The second half of the twentieth century was a rather remarkable time in Britain. All of the assumptions about town and country, the way of life which went on in each, and the kind of people who inhabited them were somewhat up-for-grabs for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.

My relationship with Kent has been a troubled one over the years. I remember deciding on a railway excursion in the mid 1990s, somewhere on the interminably dull straight line between Tonbridge and Ashford on some dirty old slam-door stock, that I was convinced I didn't like Kent at all.

Most male mid-life crises follow similar and depressingly predictable patterns - they involve embarrassing encounters with much younger women, much faster cars and far more taxing physical pursuits than are ever strictly advisable.