Quintin Lake

His 6,835-mile photo walk around Britain's coast has been turned into a book. Lake looks back on the project with Niall Hampton

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Established Digital Camera readers will remember Quintin Lake's column, 'The Perimeter'. Running between 2016 and 2020, readers were able to keep up to date with Lake's 6,835-mile photo walk around the coastline of the UK and see the body of photographic work accumulate - almost 127,000 photos were captured while he walked. And from this month, we will all be able to see the full work in Lake's new book, The Perimeter, published by Hutchinson Heinemann. Ahead of its publication, we spoke to Lake about how he translated this ambitious long-form project into book form. But travelling further back, for the benefit of any newer readers, why did he choose to walk around the coastline of mainland Britain and photograph it for posterity? "Long walks have been a normal part of my life since childhood," Lake explains.

"When I was 10, I walked with my mum from John O'Groats to Glasgow and when I was 20, I walked from Land's End to John O'Groats. That took 81 days and was done without a camera.

"Then halfway through my professional career, I caught meningitis and found it difficult to walk even a few metres. So when I recovered, I wanted to do a long walk but an easy one where I could get a taxi home, and that was the Thames Path. I walked from the source of the river in Kemble, Gloucestershire, to the sea, taking abstract square-format photographs. I did this for myself, not for an audience, but the photos sold well enough to pay for another walk." That was a walk from the source of the River Severn Britain's longest river - to the sea, and Lake found the coastal part of his journey so inspiring, making abstract images showing the different textures and colours of the sand and the light, that the genesis from that to commencing The Perimeter was just two weeks.