Hull is about to have a very long walk end on its doorstep. Karl Bushby, who left the city 28 years ago to walk around the world, is due back tomorrow, Monday 2 November, and a free exhibition is opening to mark it. The show runs from Tuesday 3 November at the Monocle building on Ferensway, and it is free to walk in.
Every week we pick 🏆 the 5 best 🏆 things to do in Hull and send them to your inbox. Just one weekly email, no spam.
By submitting your email, you accept our Privacy Policy
Bushby set off from Punta Arenas in Chile on 1 November 1998, at the age of 28, with two rules he gave himself: no transport and no returning to the UK until the mission was finished. Now 57, he reached British soil on 5 October after swimming across the English Channel to Shakespeare Beach near Dover. Tomorrow he is due a civic reception in Queen Victoria Square, led by the Lord Mayor of Hull and Admiral of the Humber, Councillor Maria Coward, before walking to his mother's home in east Hull to close the loop. By the time he reaches her door, it will be more than 10,000 days since he left.
The exhibition is put together by the property developer Allenby Commercial and sponsored by the Hull print company Jadan Press. It opens at the Monocle building at 184 Ferensway, HU1 3UT, and runs from Tuesday 3 November until early 2027, open 8am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday and 10am to 4pm on Saturdays. What is on display is the real thing: original photographs from South America, Canada, Mongolia and Serbia; diary excerpts and letters home to his father, Keith; maps of the Bering Strait and the Caspian Sea; maps marking where he slept; his swimming kit; and 'The Beast', the custom-built trolley that carried his belongings across the continents.
Bushby is the first person to walk continuously around the world, visiting 29 countries. The numbers behind it are hard to take in: 10,228 days since the start, 25 countries on the route, roughly one and a half turns around the Earth, and an estimated 75 million steps. He walked a continuous path to Hull, crossing America, Asia and Europe, with one source putting the distance at 36,000 miles and another at more than 50,000 kilometres. It is worth noting that he has only walked about 15 of those 28 years, retiring to Mexico between stages and spending the rest dealing with visas and geopolitics, with pandemic restrictions adding to the delays.
The route was rarely straightforward. In 2000 he crossed the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama disguised as a vagrant and spent eighteen days in a Panamanian jail. In 2005 and 2006 he crossed the Bering Strait on sea ice from Alaska to Russia alongside the French-American adventurer Dimitri Kieffer, facing polar bears and nearly dying of hypothermia before reaching the village of Uelen. He was later arrested and convicted of espionage in Russia between 2005 and 2008. In 2012, after a Russian visa was denied, he marched 5,600 kilometres in the opposite direction, from Los Angeles to Washington D.C., and got a new visa in 2014. In 2016 and 2017 he tried to cross the Mongolian steppe with a caravan of ten Bactrian camels, only for the group to fracture and for him to cross into China alone. In 2018 he was detained in China and kept in a hotel under armed escort.
His most recent stretch took him across the Caspian Sea in the summer of 2024, swimming 288 kilometres from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan in six-to-nine-hour shifts over thirty-one days, before walking from Baku to Istanbul. He crossed the old Bosphorus bridge on foot into Europe in April 2025, and finally swam the English Channel in October. Charlie Allenby, director at Allenby Commercial, summed up the show simply: 'If Karl's story can inspire one young person to take a chance and do something out of the box, it's absolutely worth it.'
Published Date
1 November 2026
More information
