Walking With Attitude

For several years now, "psychogeography" has been a word worth dropping into conversation if you want to impress with your cultural street smarts. More interesting than the oxbow lakes of your own school geography, and more hip than the human geography your own kids do, psychogeography sounds edgy, which it might be, if you could work out what it was. It was invented by drug-influenced French situationists - who described it as "pleasingly vague" - as they wandered round Paris in an attempt to escape the banalisation of the "spectacle". But British writers like Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home have made the term almost mainstream - a way of making familiar landscapes seem exotic, sometimes by injecting a dash of magic and mysticism. Travel writer Ian Marchant wanders along the ill-defined frontier between punk and rambling

Producer: Jolyon Jenkins

First broadcast in December 2011.