Gordon Brown’s English coast path remains unfinished after 16 years

To the untrained eye, it was the start of another typical winter’s day in Eastbourne. A procession of diggers rumbled along the beach, shifting shingle from A to B. Dogwalkers in puffer jackets stopped for a natter on the promenade. The sun lurked low on the horizon. But it wasn’t a normal day at all. This was the day Eastbourne earned a royal stamp of approval. Of sorts.

Just before Christmas, Natural England unveiled the 28-mile stretch of coast from Eastbourne to Rye Harbour as the newest section of the King Charles III England Coast Path. It may not feature the cliffs of the Jurassic Coast or the coves of Cornwall, but its completion was symbolic because it tipped the total length of the route’s finished sections to 1,360 miles: more than halfway to the final figure of 2,700 miles.

This might sound like good progress, if it wasn’t for the fact we have lived through 16 years and seven prime ministers since the coast path was first proposed. It has even changed name since then, with “King Charles III” added in May 2023. Now, Natural England says that there’s a tail-wind of momentum and the whole thing will be completed by the spring of 2026. Is the end really in sight for England’s coastal path or is it a mirage on the horizon?

A tide of troubles

Walking east of Eastbourne, along the paved promenade beside shingle beaches towards Pevensey, it struck me that nothing appeared to have changed on this “new” coastal path. There had been no dredging, no laying of boardwalks. The only new addition was a series of England Coast Path signs (mostly with no “King Charles III” on them) to guide me. At one stage I did encounter a sign warning against crossing the beach at high tide, but otherwise it felt very much like I was walking a very old route slapped with some new (already out-of-date) branding. Why, I wondered, had it taken 16 years to get here?

The idea of a continuous coastal path around England was first pitched by the Ramblers charity in the early 2000s. In 2008, it was adopted by Gordon Brown’s Labour government before being enshrined in law in 2009. Within 10 years, it was said, you would be able to walk a lap of Great Britain without interruption. Wales was planning its own coastal path, too (completed in 2012), and Scottish law allows the freedom to roam.

However, the project faced obstacles from the very beginning. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the coalition government cut the budget for Natural England in 2010. Later, an unexpected 2018 ruling by the European Court of Justice forced Natural England to polish up its paperwork for all conservation areas along the coast. In 2020, the pandemic ground plans to a halt. Then, in 2021, the Suez Canal crisis brought an unexpected shortage (and price-hike) of materials like steel, timber and cement.

Even without these unforeseen challenges, though, creating the longest waymarked coastal trail on the planet was always going to be fiddly. Some parts of the coast were exempt: military zones, schools, private gardens, and so on. In these cases, the path would make a temporary inland detour, ideally still with sea views. But these private areas only made up a fraction of the coast. In mapping 2,700 miles of coast path, Natural England had to approach more than 5,600 landowners over access, without any scope of compensation.

There were grumbles, inevitably. One online blog, published on The Farming Forum in 2018, gives an idea of some of the concerns: “I’m dreading every Tom, Dick and Harry picnicking in our sheep-grazing field with dogs,” wrote one farmer from Kent. “Within 12 months we had six ponies chased over the edge,” wrote another from Lincolnshire.

“One of the reasons this has taken many years is that we spent a long time working with every one of those owners and occupiers,” says Neil Constable, a programme manager at Natural England. On the whole, the negotiations went well. Of those 5,600 landowners, only 2.4 per cent (130 or so) raised objections to the plans. Constable points out that the coast path will also bring great economic benefits to coastal communities: “Businesses with an eye for it could diversify. Camping, caravanning, bed and breakfasts, cream teas, you name it. There are so many options.”

Now the negotiations are over, and all but 16 miles of the coast path has been submitted for approval. One of the final stretches is an eight-mile area near Lulworth Cove in Dorset, an MOD site, which Constable says will require some alternative routing when the ranges are firing. This leaves the final sticking point as Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s beloved family estate on the Isle of Wight.

In April last year, English Heritage requested exemption from the England Coast Path plans due to security concerns. It said the safety of the 10,000 royal artifacts at the property would be compromised by the introduction of a public right of way. Another factor was that visitors pay to access the grounds. Instead, the route will likely pass inland. The proposal will be filed soon.

“It feels like that is undermining the idea of it being a coast path,” says Jack Cornish, Director of England at Ramblers. “The public are locked away and kept out of sight of the coast, and not allowed to enjoy that part of the country.”

England’s disappearing pathways

After passing through the busy seafronts of Bexhill, St Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings, using Martello Towers as trig points, I walked up the Tamarisk Steps into Hastings Country Park. Up here, trying very hard not to slip over in the mud, I got a first glimpse of the ochre cliffs tumbling into the English Channel. This, the rapid erosion of our coastline, has been a further challenge. Indeed the project has taken so long that in some areas the mapped route is now underwater.

In 2023, parts of the trail between Hornsea and Bridlington in Yorkshire had to be remapped for this reason. Some parts were up to 15 yards wide just a few years ago, whereas now they are a yard wide at most, according to a local walking group. Inland detours were deemed the only safe option. A similar scenario emerged in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight that same year, after a landslide meant the path had to be rerouted up and down steep metal steps.

These routes can be redrawn without too much fuss thanks to some clever future-proofing in the drawing up of the legislation. Public footpaths, like the ones you might follow on your Ordnance Survey maps, are set in stone. However, the rights of way designated for the England Coast Path come with a level of flexibility, which allows Natural England to redraw the route – within reason – when required.

“The east coast of England is one of the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe, so it needs that, really, to be able to function and be maintained as a continuous route,” says Jack Cornish of Ramblers.

Another unique element of the coast path legislation is that, in many areas, public access includes the area known as the “coastal margin”, allowing walkers to explore dunes, beaches and cliff slopes, right up to the water’s edge (with exceptions made for unsuitable terrain, such as saltmarshes or unstable clifftops, or conservation areas).

“It created a band of open-access land for the first time – not just creating this sort of linear path, but giving people a right of access to cliffs and beaches. For an island nation, that’s pretty important,” says Cornish.

All parties sound optimistic about hitting the completion date of spring 2026. By March this year, as much as 70 per cent of the coast path will be completed, Constable says. The fact that half of it will have the wrong signage – “England Coast Path” rather than the new “King Charles III England Coast Path” – is a technicality that nobody seems to be losing sleep about. They’ll be updated in time, apparently.

After all the delays, legal wranglings, routing and the re-routing, the King Charles III England Coast Path will have cost around £28m. Which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t much – more will have been spent on London’s New Year’s Eve firework displays in the same timeframe.

As I descend from Hastings Country Park towards Fairlight and Pett Level, a stretch of the coast where dinosaur footprints scar the boulders on the beach, I know it’ll be worth the wait. Soon, we will have the longest waymarked coastal path on Earth, a route that will draw a line between seal reserves, nuclear power stations, hip seaside towns, harbour villages, wind-battered caravan parks, lighthouses, remote campsites, great industrial cities, puffin-nesting grounds and everything in between. What an asset to our island nation that will be.