Readers of last year’s best-selling urban fly-fishing blockbuster may recall how impressed we were by the locally-tied flies of Tavistock fishing guide Tim James… … which we loved enough to pick up a generous handful from the counter of English Country Pursuits, the town’s huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ shop. Some of these featured in chapter […]
Archive for May, 2013
May 21 2013
Urban river projects: Celebrating our successes (and why there’s no such thing as inevitability)
Ahead of this weekend’s third biennial Urban River Conclave, co-ordinated by the Wild Trout Trust and hosted by Salford Friendly Anglers, the WTT’s most excellent Paul Gaskell has posted this thoughtful piece on his Trout in the Town blog. Last year, he admits, he spent a lot of time drawing together an application to the […]
May 15 2013
Urban fly-fishing report: Calder, Irwell and Tame
With successive weather fronts blowing in from the Atlantic, flexibility and a functioning sense of humour were just enough to bring success when the Urbantrout team visited northern Manchester’s river systems last weekend. Starting our campaign on one of those classically post-industrial Calder tributaries, we indulged our passion for urban exploration to find bruiser trout […]
May 10 2013
Film night: Wandle mills and the lessons of hydropower history
This being the UK’s National Mills Weekend, we thought we’d take this opportunity to show an intriguing little film which recently came to our attention, thanks to the excellent Wandle Industrial Museum. Almost 12 minutes of footage (somewhat hauntingly, no soundtrack) show several Wandle mill wheels still turning at some time during the 1960s or […]
May 7 2013
Rivers by Design: A new primer for urban and post-industrial river restorationists everywhere
Last week’s annual River Restoration Centre conference was buzzing with conversation about an exciting new publication by the EU LIFE+ funded RESTORE partnership project: the Rivers by Design manual. Rivers by Design is subtitled A guide for planners, developers, architects and landscape architects on maximising the benefits of river restoration. So it was always likely […]
