Surely it is Stoke Newington: Machen in Coverley's Psychogeography (2006)

Reading Coverley's Psychogeography, and as an untiring reader and celebrator of Machen's sublime story "N," I quickly underlined these paragraphs:

....Iain Sinclair identifies Bunhill Fields, the Dissenters burial ground, as the focal point of his psychogeography of London, but surely it is Stoke Newington, where Defoe was schooled at the Dissenters Academy and which was later to provide a home for Edgar Allan Poe, that must take precedence as the city's most resonant psychogeographical location. In either case it is the figure of Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) who inaugurates London's long psychogeographical tradition. With his twin roles as political radical and father of the London novel, Defoe is the first writer to offer a vision of London shaped according to his own peculiar imaginary topography, and in his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe, Defoe introduces a character who has haunted both the novel and the literature of psychogeography ever since.

....Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was born in Gwent and moved to London to pursue a literary career, working variously as a journalist, translator and cataloguer of esoteric literature. Much of Machen's writing is shaped by the enchanted landscapes of his Welsh childhood but this sense of place and an otherworldly awareness of the bizarre and the fantastic was soon to be transported to the streets of his adopted city. Machen was to take the 'Ars Magna of London', the 'Great Art' of the city as the source for much of his writing, and in his early gothic works the familiar streets of city were shown to conceal a world of supernatural significance.

     In both The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors Machen was to continue Robert Louis Stevenson's legacy by portraying a gothic London where nothing is as it seems and where the mundane and the familiar obscure the true nature of the city:

     

     Here, then, is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes… I think it is easier to discern the secret beauty and wonder and mystery in humble and common things than in the splendid and noble and storied things.19

     

     For Machen, the trained eye can reveal the eternal behind the commonplace. He is indebted to Stevenson for the use of this observation within a fictional setting, but London was to provide Machen with much more than merely inspiration for his writing. In essence, it provided him with a new means of experiencing his environment. Machen, like de Quincey before him, stands within a tradition of writer as walker and his representation of the London streets is informed as much by autobiography as it is by imagination. And it is in these wanderings through the city that Machen becomes a prototype for both the flâneur20 and for today's breed of psychogeographer. Early novels in which the characters do the walking were soon to give way to autobiographical tales in which it is Machen himself who walks the city streets. In books such as Things Near and Far and The London Adventure Machen narrates his own adventures within those 'raw, red places all around the walls of London', outlining his peculiar 'London science' in which the aim is to 'utterly shun the familiar'21 in favour of a deliberate attempt to lose oneself amongst the overlooked quarters of the city.

     This conscious attempt to ignore the known aspects of the city in favour of an aimless wandering, driven solely by the force of the imagination, indicates the degree to which Machen is a hybrid figure in which writer and walker merge. By allowing himself to commune with the strangeness of his surroundings, Machen was to discover the delights of mental travel in which the exotic was literally to be found upon one's doorstep and where the lure of the foreign was to be rendered redundant by the promise of experiences to be found closer to home:

     

     And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray's Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. "The matter of our work is everywhere present," wrote the old alchemists, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone's-throw of King's Cross Station… I will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these things are… But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten… And all historical associations; they too must be laid aside… Of all this the follower of the London Art must purge himself when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.22

     

     Ultimately, Machen is outlining the practice of psychogeography in these remarks, for as he frees himself from all geographical or historical markers, Machen remaps the city as he passes through it, and in establishing a trajectory away from the more well-trodden centre toward the overlooked suburban quarters of the city, Machen points the way for today's generation of psychogeographers as they explore London's anonymous outer limits….

From: Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley (2006, Pocket Essentials)