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Coast to Coast: From Dungeness to Weston-super-Mare and Cardiff to Conwy

By: Janet Street-Porter
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: BBC Books
ISBN: 0563384247
ISBN-13: 9780563384243
Released: 12 Mar 1998
RRP: £18.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Coast to Coast With Janet! - By: Jake M, 31 Jan 2008
I found "Coast to Coast" by the legendary Janet Street Porter to be very interesting & it encouraged me to visit the places that she visted during her TV shows & mentioned within this book. Many great, beautiful photographs are included & are a bonus.
If your interested in & enjoy walking, this is a brilliant, well written book for you to read.
Addendum - By: Peter Bradford, 09 Jul 2004
When I wrote the above review, I had just finished the first part of the book-the so-callled "West to East" section.
Janet's description of the second part-the route through Wales-reads much better & easier than the first; hence the upgrade to three stars.
If you can pick this up at a very reduced price, & if you skip the first section, it might make a worthwhile read. At the original £18+ asking price, I should say it's well overpriced.
What I Did On My Summer Holidays - By: Peter Bradford, 22 Jun 2004
This book seemed to offer a chance for me to read about some of the things I miss since I left the UK; details of the beautiful British countryside, & told by a well-respected writer & TV personality. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement.

Janet's account reads like a primary school pupil's account of what she got up to during the 'hols'. It wouldn't surprise me to find that at least one third of the sentences start with the word 'I':

I then took the path leading....

I came to a stile...
I arrived at the meeting place an hour late...

I expect better of a professional writer-yes, that was intentional.

Exclamation marks abound, mostly for no good reason that I could see, & the writing seems so predictable. So many chapters or paragraphs are seemingly stamped out with what my American friends would calll a cookie-cutter:

I left the inn/house/pub the next morning. The footpath was supposed to start at the back/left/right of the building, but after half-an-hour/45 minutes/an hour I still couldn't find it so had to walk along the road till I came to a farm/bridle path/track. Here the corn/nettles/barley was high/treated with chemicals, & scratched/blistered my legs.

On practicallly the first page there is a glaring error, although I'm sure this is not Ms Street-Porter's fault. The first of the two maps is labelled 'West to East; Dungeness to Weston-Super-Mare'. Well, things have changed significantly since I left England in the 80s, but I trust Weston hasn't migrated to continental Europe.

Finallly, although again I'm sure this is not Ms Street-Porter's fault, I found the typeface very difficult to read, exacerbated by the smalll size of the punctuation-perhaps that's why she chose to use so many exclamation marks-and the tiny space between sentences. This reader often found himself running into the next sentence a couple of words before he realised he'd overshot the mark.