To start with what this is not, this is not a gazetteer of peculiar places in Britain you might one day fancy looking at. Neither is it a travel book, with the author digging up unusual roundabouts, touring power stations and moseying about unique housing estates. It is instead a quite circuitous, often structure-free look round Britain, trying to pre-empt a time when what we live in and adjacent to now, and how we live today, becomes the legend and fairy tale of a future Britain.

Perhaps because I was expecting something along the lines of what I've said it was not, I didn't really take to the opening chapter on power cable pylons, despite a few flashes of interest in their history and the growth of their use in the 1920s and 1930s. But clearer examples of the book's successes came quickly after – a look at roundabouts, and the idea that legends of the crossroads beneath them can just as easily be carried on long after we're gone; and our humdrum housing, and how if it gets haunted it's clearly little different to the token Victorian mansion. An Enfield poltergeist and others have made it to Hollywood, so the idea there is no psychogeography to be had in the routine estate or tower block is clearly incorrect. (And let's face it, what was the renaming of the road that contained 10 Rillington Place, or demolishing Fred and Rose West's home, if not an effort to immediately exorcise their demons?)

And if it's ghosts of the now getting ready for the future you want, what about the concatenation of stories to be found in a modern hospital? What vestiges of our life can be left on, and currently seen from, a motorway? All told it's not a bad book, but not great. I sought a structured format of some design, which the final chapter ironically proves we could have had, and less instant jumping from someone's artwork or film to autobiography to social history and back again. The writer can write, but also prefers to use five words where one would do. Still, he comes across as most erudite, living his subjects and knowing each and every small press publication to have ever mentioned anywhere he finds himself. There are considerations here that he surely nails, if you're his target audience – I found myself on the margins of that category a little too often, but even with this being less Fortean than I thought it would be, it was still reasonable company for a few hours.

There's much to enjoy in Gareth Rees's tour of/guide to "urban legends, uncanny events, contemporary folklore, and cryptozoological beasts" in Britain. It takes in pylons, roundabouts, power stations, multistoreys, and the M6, some of which may be familiar from Rees's previous work and the amount of research he has put in is impressive. Occasionally it comes to close to the striving for significance that undermines the more prosaic attempts at psychogeography that become a little too common and which Will Wiles (referred to here) satirises in Plume. Nevertheless, Rees has an eye for a good story and an intriguing detail (the first multi-storey was built, inevitably in London, in 1901, for example) and, although over-serious in tone, there's much to enjoy here even for those who unaccountably don't love pylons as much as Rees does.

When people think of traveling to Great Britain, they think about seeing the Tower of London, Big Ben and all the other tourist icons, but as Rees explains, there are other, overlooked areas that truly represent Britain and her inhabitants. Places that seem insignificant at first glance, but that hold meaning to the many people who have lived, loved and died in their shadow. Having a father who was raised in London, I was told stories about some of the city’s most famous landmarks, but also about the fountain he was playing in when he heard that England was at war with Germany and the tree in Epping Forest he used to sit under when his parents argued. Those places are as real to me as they were to my father, and thanks to Rees, I now know of other lesser known areas in Britain that were just as important to other British people