Great British walks with Stuart Maconie

During a 25-year-career, ex-NME journalist Stuart Maconie has rubbed shoulders with some of the most iconic British bands, including Arctic Monkeys and The Stone Roses. More recently, he’s been co-hosting the Radcliffe & Maconie Show on BBC Radio 6 Music and authored the best-selling treatise on the north, Pies & Prejudice.

Stuart’s passion for pulling on his hiking boots and rambling through Britain’s landscapes is the feature of his monthly column in Country Walking, of which 50 have been selected and compiled his latest book, Never Mind The Quantocks.

Wanderlust‘s Tom Hawker talks to Stuart about the wonderful facets of walking, glove-thievery on a photo shoot with The Stone Roses and the triumphs of his Country Walking column.

How did you first get into walking?

I grew up in the North West, so I’d always gone to the Lake District with mates, fishing, drinking beer and camping. Then one day my wife told me that she’d like to go to the Lake District. I blindly replied that I knew the Lake District like the back of my hand.

But when we got there, she asked me the name of a mountain and I had no idea. I realised that I knew the pubs but I’d never lifted my hind up to the hillside. So we bought some cheap gear from Grasmere post office and pootled to Helvellyn.

When we got to the top I looked through the Wainwright viewfinder and it was a completely different world up there – something that most people never got a chance to see.

And then I just got that buzz – “Where could this all go?”

At the time I was working for the NME so my day job was travelling all over the world with rock bands, which was huge fun of course. But that wasn’t the life I wanted on my days off. The Lake District was the perfect solution.

But that was it. After the Lake District, I never really looked back.