Paul Gogarty

Gogarty faithfully records the sights, sounds, and smells of villages and people he meets along his journey around the coast of England. All 2,800 miles of it in a newly acquired emotive motorhome he named Sid Sundance. He is no stranger to traveling around England. Gogarty previously spent four month on a pilgrimage around 900 miles of England's inland waterways. This time he is traveling from town to town following the sea. At every stop he meets interesting people. From refugees seeking asylum to fishermen and artists; a man who poses as Dracula for tourists.
There is a sadness to Gogarty's observations and conversations with locals in these poor seaside towns. Like Coney Island in New York, the grandness of the metropole in the late 1800s has all been changed since the devastation of war. The nostalgic heyday of Joseph Conrad and Henry James has given way to gaudy health clubs and modern art galleries with bad art. Gogarty describes the depressed area like a deflated balloon long forgotten after a birthday party. The children have all gone home and the decorations droop neglected. But Coast Road is not just a travelogue. You will get history lessons, studies in architecture, a running commentary on ecology and natural history, humor.
Can I just say I loved Gogarty's writing? Every sentence was a explosion of imagery filled with aching beauty. My heart broke for the fisherman who could not quit the sea even though he had long since resigned himself to a life on terra firma. I smiled at the delightful memory of the Gogarty family bombing down the road - mom and dad on a motorcycle while the kids (all three of them) snuggled in the sidecar. Fast forward to adulthood: the advance of technology and the ability to send copy from the comfort of the front seat of Gogarty's car elicited a grin from me. I would like to visit the pub that can only serve three guests at one time.… (más)

Paul Gogarty takes a trip in a motorhome around England, missing out Wales and Scotland. In fact he didn't pick the motorhome up until Devon and so for the south-east and south coast he was staying in B&Bs and hotels, rather than camping. His style is relaxed and chatty, he clearly enjoys being by the sea and takes pleasure from talking to people he meets and re-telling their stories and we meet all sorts of characters on these pages. He particularly enjoys meeting people who make a living from the sea or did once, mostly fisherman. This is a book of its time; it is written about 10-years ago, in 2004 and so before the 2008 crash. This period where people are obsessed with house prices and taking advantage of the market to move out of London to the coast now seems like another world and the trip would be different today. However, one issue that is still with us is refugees and asylum seekers and Paul Gogarty takes a sympathetic approach to people from other countries that he meets. Paul Gogarty is a travel writer and journalist and writes well, although he does overuse the word 'luminosity'. We don't hear much about the joys of motorhoming, although he does seem to get in the swing of it and even waves at another motorhomer towards the end of the book. For a northerner it felt as if he pottered slowly along the south coast and clearly very much enjoyed his time in Cornwall and then positively trotted through the north of England missing out so many wonderful places.… (más)

I alway enjoy travel books, particularly those taking the pulse of the UK. And to some extent this is what was achieved here by Paul Gogarty as he travel around the coast of England. Generally this focuses on many of the towns and people around the English littoral, a journey he makes in a donated motorhome that he christens Sid. The style is lighthearted and relaxed, but at times the pace at which the journey takes place is so speedy that many places are missed out.

The joy of these types of books is when the author writes about somewhere you as the reader are familiar with. However, I was personally left disappointed with the bits he missed out. Places I know such as Rye, Filey and Whitstable never get a mention and probably weren't visited. The South West section in particular suffers from the omission of huge chunks of the north Devon and Somerset coast, and there is a big jump up to Bristol.

The other big disappointment was that this dealt with only England. Part of the premise of the book is that as an island nation, we Brits are surrounded by water and hence a coastline. As this only covers England, we get the awkward bit where he has to hot foot it up the M5 and M6 to get from Bristol to Liverpool, and similarly the need to jump across the north to get from the Solway to Berwick. Clearly including Wales and Scotland would have made for a mammoth undertaking, particularly with the prospect of the west coast of Scotland, but it would have made the book more complete.

Gogarty has written a similar book on canals, and I enjoyed this book enough to hunt that one out.… (más)