Following the success of Oriental Scenery, an ambitious collection of views from India compiled from drawings made during his travels with his uncle, Thomas Daniell, between 1784 and 1794, in 1813, William Daniell embarked on a journey around the coast of Great Britain to make drawings of the scenery and views of significant river ports. The intention of this journey was to address that "while the inland counties of England have been so hackneyed by travellers and quartos, the Coast has hitherto been most unaccountably neglected" excepting those sea resorts popular with the well-to-do. Daniell, starting at Land's End in Cornwall, made a series of tours over the next ten years. The resulting publication, issued in eight volumes between 1814 and 1825, provided an informative and dramatically illustrated overview of the British coastline. The 308 aquatints, which accompanied the text, were finely executed and often showed evocative scenes of shipwrecks, prosperous port towns, sea bird colonies and rugged coastlines.

The work was well-received and Daniell was elected Royal Academician in 1822, taking the place left vacant by his friend and confidant, the artist and diarist Joseph Farington, who had died the previous winter. Farington's manuscript diary, as well as some of his papers, also found in the Royal Library, provides some of the only surviving information about Daniell's life and working habits.