Et In Suburbia Ego

Facing a bone marrow transplant for blood cancer, a procedure with a one in five chance of proving fatal — while the alternative was simply to die — Will Self, the preeminent English psychogeographer of our era, set out to walk the streets of London, his native city.

Battling with his symptoms, he assigned himself a task as obdurate as it was obtuse: to promenade almost exclusively within the London suburbs built in the interwar period; that great sprawl of suburbia, that, like some twee Tudorbethan tree ring, defines the metropolis's bizarre dendrochronology. By confining himself to the city of that era, Self's intention was to psychically apprehend the very material reality of his own being. Having grown up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, itself an idealised vision of a timeless English neverland built in the 1920s and 30s, and as the son of a theorist of town planning, Self's divagating circumambulation would, he hoped, make it possible for him to finally grasp all that privet, paving, and fake-gabling, so as to say with conviction: "This is this," even as his body was telling him: Et in Suburbia Ego.