Falling in love with the Wandle: Damon Valentine‘s first feature for Eat, Sleep, Fish (and here’s the report from the Wandle Trust’s Christmas cleanup!) Catching the urban fly-fishing vibe at Orvis UK’s inaugural book evening: Calibre magazine reports from an exciting new literary festival The Wild Trout Trust‘s deculverting project on Sheffield’s Porter Brook wins a major national prize Fish […]
Author Archive
December 16 2016
Merry Christmas to all Urbantrout’s supporters!
It’s fair to say that 2016 has been unexpected in lots of ways. But one thing hasn’t changed – the growing community of urban fly-fishers who’ve been reading this website (and sometimes sporting our own favourite eco-branded fishing gear in search of the big one in destinations near and far). We’ve got lots of exciting new […]
December 12 2016
Film night: Fishing the Battenkill
OK, so maybe it’s mostly a commercial for the latest generation in the classic Orvis family of Battenkill reels… … but this is so much our kind of angle on a famous fishery on the north-eastern seaboard of the USA – relevantly linking a big brand’s manufacturing heritage with the whole very funky, very now story of recovering […]
November 28 2016
Urban fly-fishing makes headlines in Petri-Heil: Grayling in the River Wiese, Basel
As readers of this blog may have noticed by now, here at Urbantrout we definitely dig the knowledge that we’re part of something bigger… especially when that ‘something bigger’ is the international brotherhood of urban fly-fishing. Martin Pütter was one of the earliest volunteers on the Wandle river restoration project, and for several years he […]
November 17 2016
Urban fly-fishing report: River Exe, Tiverton
On a sudden half-term whim, the Urbantrout team went west to try something we’d never done before. If you’ve read Trout in Dirty Places, you may recall that the little River Lowman got most of the word count in the chapter on Tiverton – we photographed the main River Exe in the middle of town, […]
November 8 2016
Marine plastic pollution: Catch it in your river first!
If Broken Windows Theory didn’t exist, you could almost make a case for not pulling all the shopping trolleys out of urban rivers. After all, when every other scrap of habitat has been dredged out or covered in concrete, even a stray shopping cart can offer shelter for fish and invertebrates from floods and predators… … […]
October 31 2016
Film night: Autumn in Andorra
Full disclosure: we’ve been saving this up for you all spring and summer, but now it’s time to showcase this awesome little end-of-trout-season urban fishing film from Enoc Ripoll and the C&R-committed Pescadors d’Andorra, complete with a banging Kongos soundtrack. Get your European concrete canyon head on, crank up your speakers, and enjoy…
October 16 2016
More headlines from Manchester: Trout & Salmon magazine features the mighty Irwell
It’s a satisfying thought that since Trout in Dirty Places was published in 2012, the whole idea of urban fly-fishing has gone so mainstream that you can hardly pick up one of the monthly magazines without finding at least one article about what used to be our dirty little secret… The latest in this canon […]
October 3 2016
Urbantrout hoodies and beanie hats: it’s that time of year again!
Fly Fest is over for another year, trout season is drawing to a close, and yes, we’re even hearing reports of the first frost of autumn. All this can only mean one thing: it’s time to break out the hoodies and hard-weather beanie hats, and get properly ready for grayling. Urbantrout streetstyle hoodies and beanie […]
September 28 2016
Pic of the day: Matt Sewell art on the Rea Brook
For urban fly-fishers exploring the edgelands of our towns and cities, graffiti is a common sight. Old brick arches, hard concrete river banks and derelict factory walls offer almost everything a spraycan kid could ask for: an endless blank(ish) canvas, and plenty of slightly sinister seclusion to wait for the muse to strike. Still, not everyone […]
