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Foreword by Russell Brand

Introduction

1 The Wild West – Gunnersbury to Hounslow Heath

2 Off to Bec Phu – Leytonstone to Beckton

3 The Road to Erith Pier – Woolwich Ferry to Crayford Ness

4 Beyond the Velodrome – Lewisham to Tulse Hill

5 The ‘Lost Elysium’ – Sudbury Hill to Hanwel

6 The End of the World on Uxendon Hill – Golders Green to Wembley via the Welsh Harp

7 Wassailing the Home Territory – The Lea Valley

8 Pilgrimage from Merlin’s Cave to the Land of the Dead – Saffron Hill to Hornsey

9 Life on Mars – Vauxhall to Tooting Bec

10 Going Down to South Park – Wanstead Flats to Ilford

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements and Thanks

Copyright

About the Publisher

John Rogers is an important person in my life. As well as being one of my best friends he serves as a navigational point in musings and conversations. Often when discussing the non-negotiable nature of sin my mates and I will say, ‘Well what would John Rogers do?’ As you will learn in these pages John lives in Leytonstone with his two sons and his wife, Heidi, and in spite of the inferred domesticity of that set-up he is a man who lives on society’s margins. Not through occultism or deviance but through his astonishing ability to accumulate and more importantly relay extraordinary information. He is like Prospero crossed with Mr Chips.

I met John in London whilst participating in one of the many half-arsed sub-fringe sketch shows that go on in the capital. We were performing at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith where they used to make TFI Friday. It quickly became clear that the show we were involved in would yield very little and equally clear that John would become a friend for life. John is endowed with a gentle, humble, humorous wisdom, which is evident throughout these pages. You can learn from John on topics as diverse as Marxism, botany, football, punk, astronomy, gastronomy and love.

Someone once described being in love as like finding a secluded ballroom in the house in which you’d always lived. To walk through London with John is like that. The city is suddenly alive with concealed plaques, submerged rivers and unnoticed gargoyles. John is like an alchemist, not only in that he is unkempt and dresses like a person who has fallen through the cracks, he also makes the mundane and unremarkable glow with newly imbued magic. We once walked through my hometown of Grays in Essex, past the ambulance station at the top of our street, and I instinctively jumped on the knee-high wall to stroll along it as I’d always done as a child. When I told John who was beside me, he said that we could consider memories of a place as objects: left strewn about until we return to collect them.