Britain is a country of fields and country lanes, lakes and woods – and car parks. Roughly 20,000 of them(the government stopped counting in 2014). As Gareth E Rees writes in his new book Car Park Life, there is “an assumed truth that car parks are non-places without geography, nature, social history or cultural nuance” – and he wants to correct that.

It starts with a late-night, post-pub stroll through Rees’s favourite car park, at the Morrisons supermarket in Hastings. Suddenly, he notices things he previously hadn’t seen; what he calls the “secret lives that hide in plain sight”. Elsewhere, his finds include a dried-up water channel built by Sir Francis Drake, now located between a B&Q and a KFC (Crownhill Retail Park in Plymouth – Rees’s second-favourite facility); neolithic standing stones; a dinosaur footprint; a long history of dogging and drug deals; a tree stump ominously covered in women’s shoes; and a dead body.

“Beyond its ostensible subject, he tells me, the book is “about the power of imagination to enchant and enliven even the most mundane places. It also describes how we are being manipulated into consuming more and more commodities, no matter the environmental, social and psychological costs, as if this is an inevitable part of reality.” For him, Car Park Life is a plea “to reclaim the spaces of consumerism, free our minds from its conditioning and imagine a different way of organising our society”.

‘The doctrine of never-ending economic growth on a finite planet is dooming us. Cars and retail are part of that threat’ ... Gareth E Rees

Part travel memoir, part urban exploration and part cultural critique, Car Park Life is a bit like WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, if you substitute car parks for the Suffolk countryside. Just as Sebald worried over many things alongside the English landscape he walks through, Car Park Life is just as much about Rees’s failed marriage, his worries over his writing career and the ravages of capitalism as it is a study of the “carscape” . Rees is happy to call it a psychogeography – focused on “the psychology of a place: its effect on our behaviour, emotions and imagination”. At one point in the book, he even leads a tour around a Huddersfield car park as part of the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography, while sporting a slogan T-shirt: “My Psychogeography Is Better Than Your Psychogeography.”

Rees leads this group within 30ft of the aforementioned body, which is discovered a few weeks later. From this, Rees extrapolates a small, tragic history of unnoticed car park deaths: the man reported missing for a month who had, in fact, been dead in an Asda car park; the dead priest who sat unnoticed outside a Morrisons for days over Christmas. “Even when looking closely, I didn’t see that deeper, darker layer of car park life and death,” Rees writes. “I missed the real story that was there, all the time.”

Rees acknowledges how ridiculous his project is. But as he writes: “It isn’t the objects that must change, but our view of them, and our view of ourselves in relation to them … When enough human beings realise this truth, we may have the potential for change.” He believes that the shift in perspective required to better acknowledge what we usually ignore could be a step towards more radical, societal change. It is both ludicrous and profoundly moral.

“I hope that readers will see a familiar landscape in a new light, and understand that there is magic and mystery all around, no matter where you live,” he says. “Perhaps they’ll begin to challenge the methods used by capitalism to control the way we think and act. The doctrine of never-ending economic growth on a finite planet is dooming us. Cars and retail are part of that threat. We need to think radically about the future and stop clinging to the ideas of the past.”

The past plays a crucial role in the book. Car parks have long been developed over wild spaces and beautiful landscapes; fossils and even Richard III have been known to lurk beneath. Returning to the Makro car park in Manchester, a significant spot from Rees’s childhood, he is forced to confront the “landscape nostalgia, the lie of the halcyon past”. What he remembers is not the tarmac and bay markings, but what he and his brother made of it with their imaginations; forced to wait in the car whilst their parents shopped, they played as pilots of a Mazda spaceship.

The heart of darkness is not at the end of an exotic river. It’s outside your supermarket Gareth E Rees

This mix of the personal, political and historical culminates in a final section on Brexit. A month before the EU referendum, and his marriage over, Rees is in Kent for a literary festival and takes a trip to nearby Reculver, where a 12th-century church is built over a 7th-century monastery, which was built over a Roman fort next to a fossil-strewn beach. “Stories of invasion and assimilation, adaptation and innovation, change and renewal, all laid out across this coastal stage,” he writes. Rees compares this with the cultural erosion that some Brexit voters blamed on immigration. “At what arbitrary point in history would they like time frozen? What evidence is there in nature of the possibility of total stasis, never mind the benefits?” he writes.

Wandering in the countryside, Rees follows a trail of trash to a service station. “I tried to escape into the countryside but ended up back in a car park,” he writes. “Perhaps escape is not possible for any of us, as we head for a political, economic and ecological cliff edge … We get the landscapes we deserve and what we deserve is the chainstore car park.”

Since finishing the book, Rees has ceased his expeditions. “Although I have occasionally used them as a shopper,” he says. “I am doomed to use car parks for as long as shops and cars exist.” He has not abandoned the built environment, however. He is now exploring multi-storey car parks, flyovers, roundabouts and even motorways for another book, due out next year. But even if he has moved on, what is built into the retail car park remains: consumerism, climate change, pollution, poverty and austerity.

“These aren’t just things that are happening somewhere else, they’re right here,” he says. “Racist attacks, road rage, homelessness, child grooming, gun crime, heat-absorbing tarmac, rain run-off. The heart of darkness is not at the end of an exotic river. It’s outside your supermarket.”

After finishing Car Park Life, I needed to pick up some groceries. Stepping out of the supermarket - a space I had regularly visited for years - I was suddenly aware of my surroundings: the positioning of trees, the bays, the mazy twists required to escape it. Unlike Conrad’s Marlow, Rees never finds his Kurtz. I’m still not convinced there’s any meaning to find in a car park. But I never thought I’d be comparing one to Heart of Darkness either.