King Charles III England Coast Path – meet the man who helped it happen
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 2,700 mile-long trail around the shore of England is the longest managed coastal walking route in the world. It gives unprecedented access to the shoreline, thanks to many years of painstaking work by today's guest – Neil Constable, who led the project for Natural England. We caught up on a breezy day...
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 30th of March. |
| 0:10.7 | A little bit breezy, but at least we now have the clocks going forward, which means that it is now officially summertime. |
| 0:18.3 | What better thing to do than go to part of England's coast? |
| 0:23.4 | And would you believe there is now King Charles III England coast path? And would you also believe |
| 0:30.3 | that Neil Constable is the programme director? He has been for this project since 2013. Neil, congratulations. We will be about 90% there |
| 0:42.7 | this summer and with the final 10% to finish over the coming 12 months. And the king earlier this |
| 0:49.7 | month actually launched the project. What was the exact event? Yes, so we were privileged to have |
| 0:56.8 | His Majesty the King officially launched the trail down at seven sisters on the East Sussex Coast. |
| 1:03.9 | When, for example, Ireland launched the Wild Atlantic Way, all they did was stringed together |
| 1:09.1 | a few old lanes and roads and paths and call it a |
| 1:12.8 | fantastic way to explore the West of Ireland, which indeed it is. Is that basically what you've done here |
| 1:17.4 | just strung together a whole load of lanes and paths and put out some signs? No, it's not actually, |
| 1:23.1 | Simon. So what we did was to start with complete review of what access already existed on the coast legally. |
| 1:29.4 | I'm going to have to stop me there because I can't just automatically because I'm a British person get access to the English seaside. |
| 1:36.5 | You can in many places, but not everywhere. |
| 1:39.4 | And that's the thing. |
| 1:40.2 | We knew when we started this programme that on average, and it is an average, every two miles, |
| 1:44.9 | you hit an obstacle. So what we did was start with what access already existed. Was it fit for |
| 1:51.6 | purpose? Did it give you sea views? Was it close to the sea and so on? Could we make that better? |
| 1:57.2 | And what do we have to do to join it all up? Back in 2009, sorry, visa legislative was passed |
| 2:04.2 | which created a statutory duty upon natural England and the Department of the Environment, |
| 2:09.7 | food and rural affairs, to create a long-distance walking route around the entire coast of England. |
... |
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