River mending in an urban Royal Park: installing a Downstream Defender in Richmond Park to improve water quality in south London’s Beverley Brook (Part 2 coming soon!) The River Restoration Centre visits a range of Healthy Rivers Project sites around Caerphilly in south Wales The wetter the better? Making the mental leap to treating storm […]
Author Archive
August 25 2017
Film night: Riverfly monitoring (and much more) on Sheffield’s prize-winning Porter Brook
So, this film is already showing on the Wild Trout Trust’s Trout in the Town site, but we reckon it’s so important that we want to mirror it here too. Mending urban and rural rivers alike is all about restarting natural processes, as well as making sure that improvements are bedding in properly. And the […]
August 3 2017
Pic of the day: From Wincanton to the Wandle
Sharing the urban river love is what Urbantrout and Trout in the Town are all about… … and we know from long experience that there’s no better way to do it than supporting each others’ volunteer events. A case in point: CATCH chair Gary Hunt recently took a day trip from Somerset to south London, […]
July 17 2017
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 17 July
Team England coach Jeremy Lucas reports from this year’s IFFA River International fly-fishing competition on the Ebbw (one of the best post-industrial rivers in Wales!) News from Manchester: Mersey Basin Rivers Trust and Healthy Rivers Trust merge to form the new Mersey Rivers Trust 20 best places to enjoy London’s rewilded rivers Flash floods and […]
July 4 2017
Pic of the day: CHALK on the Wandle
Thanks to a recent edition of Simon Cooper’s always-entertaining weekly newsletters, we know two things about the crowdfunded CHALK movie (billed as ‘a feature length film celebrating the importance of the chalkstreams of southern England in the history and development of fly fishing’). Firstly, it’s on: filming has already begun. Secondly, some of it has been […]
June 26 2017
London Rivers Week 2017 is here!
If you’re into urban rivers and everything about them (like we are) there’s no bigger or better event than London Rivers Week… … which has just been launched on the banks of the Ravensbourne in Ladywell Fields in Lewisham. As Thames21’s London Rivers Week web hub says: London Rivers Week aims to inspire people like […]
May 26 2017
Pic of the day: Fun in the sun, cleaning up the Frome
It’s fair to say that this photo caused a bit of unexpected kerfuffle when it appeared on Facebook a few days ago (Can you or can’t you legally pull shopping trolleys and other rubbish out of your local river? The authoritative answer: Yes, you can!) We also say: Kudos to Dan, Simon and Richard and […]
May 16 2017
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 15 May
Exploring ‘the drain’: David James Bendle takes a friend fishing on an Irwell tributary ‘Haunted rubble and half-vanished walls’ on the banks of Winchester’s River Itchen Tenkara in the edgelands: David West Beale gets his stalk on SERT takes out the River Club weir on the Hogsmill near Tolworth in south London The Littering Fisherman: […]
May 3 2017
Film night: Pollution hits the Irwell (again)
It’s a sickening experience to see your local river destroyed by pollution, but with the best will in the world there’s nothing very much for outside observers to say or do except sympathise deeply, offer any support that’s needed, and thank their lucky stars that it wasn’t their river… this time. That’s why we’ve been […]
April 8 2017
Trout in Dirty Places: Now available as an ebook!
Five years (count ’em already!) since this groundbreaking urban fishing and river-mending title was published in 2012… … publishers Merlin Unwin Books have now released Trout in Dirty Places in ebook format. Available from Amazon, iBooks and Kobo, it’s priced at £10.00 or less. So, if you’ve been reading this site, but haven’t fully come over to […]
