Photographer walks entire British mainland coastline for book

BBC News

11-05-2025

A photographer has published a book documenting a 6,835 mile (11,000km) walk around the entire coastline of mainland Britain.Quintin Lake, from Cheltenham, walked the route in chunks over five years, having first set off from the steps of St Paul's Cathedral on 17 April 2015.His journey took a total of 454 days, with Mr Lake taking 130,000 pictures on the journey for his book The Perimeter."Unless there was barbed wire, I really did walk the lot," he said. "There's no right or wrong way to do it but I was very particular in how close I kept to the edge."
Mr Lake has previously undertaken other long walks, documenting the source of the River Thames to London, and photographing the length of the River Severn."Once I covered 1,000 miles (1,609km) it was quite hard to stop," he said."Scotland was a completely different endeavour - there was a lot of trial and error following the mountain ridges, and large parts were overgrown so there was a lot of backtracking, and it was exhausting physically."In the winter you don't see people for four or five days, and the days are very short as well."
Mr Lake broke two walking poles on the journey and suffered a torn tendon that laid him up for two months on the journey."One night on a steep path I slipped, and my pole stopped me from falling down a cliff."In Holderness in Yorkshire where the coast erodes five to seven metres a year, I didn't realise that and I got stuck below the cliffs as the tide came up, that was quite terrifying. "The constant thing was dealing with cold and wet when you're by yourself in a tent. "I had one dry set of clothes, but in the morning putting wet cold clothes on in the morning was the worst part," he said.
It took Mr Lake three years to edit the pictures and a further 14 months to produce the book."When you walk you make your own luck as a photographer, but you meet really interesting people and that's what makes adventuring with a camera fascinating," he said.