Two thousand seven hundred miles of coastline, and until this week, no legal guarantee you could walk all of it.

The King Charles III England Coast Path, officially inaugurated this March, grants walkers a continuous right of access from Berwick-upon-Tweed in the northeast to Land’s End in Cornwall. It is now the longest managed coastal trail in the world — and the first time the English public has held a legal right to traverse their own shoreline end to end.

Two Decades in the Making

The Labour government under Gordon Brown proposed the path in 2008, and the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 gave it legal teeth — establishing public rights to walk the coast and access the “coastal margin” of beaches, dunes, cliffs, and foreshore.

Work began in 2009, but delays soon mounted: austerity cuts in 2010 slashed funding, a 2018 European Court ruling forced conservation paperwork revisions, and COVID halted fieldwork entirely. Natural England staff approached more than 25,000 individual landowners to negotiate access. Just 2.4 percent raised objections.

The final price tag: approximately £28 million across 18 years, with roughly 1,000 miles of entirely new path built — including bridges, boardwalks, and a stretch at Southmoor Nature Reserve constructed from 75,000 recycled plastic bottles.

Not Quite Finished

About 77 percent of the route is open at launch, with remaining sections still to come. But the principle is settled: this coast is public ground. For a country where right-to-roam battles have simmered for over a century, that is no small thing.

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