London

The film's narrator returns to London after having been away for seven years to help Robinson, a friend and ex-boyfriend, with an unspecified project. Together they go hiking to three different places.

First they walk from Strawberry Hill in Twickenham - where Horace Walpole wrote the gothic horror story ''The Castle of Otranto'' - to Robinson's flat in Vauxhall. The walk is a way of trying to incorporate English gothic fiction as an explanation to the emphasis on surrealism in their literary investigations.

Their second walk starts out from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire's reluctant lover's house in Stockwell, to the place where Edgar Allan Poe went to school in Stoke Newington. The journey goes via two Roman roads and London Bridge, the place from where London expanded after being founded by the Romans.

Their third journey goes through the outer suburbs and follows the river Brent from Brent Cross to Brentford.

Contemporary life distracts our guides as they investigate London's literary and artistic past.

Medverkande
Paul Scofield (Narrator): Producent
Keith Griffiths: Manus
Patrick Keiller: Foto
Patrick Keiller: Talat språk
English