What does the birth of an urban river restoration project look like? In the case of the little River Cale in Wincanton, everything seems to have started with a few beers in somebody’s garage, swiftly followed by a suitable acronym (CATCH: Community Action to Transform Cale Habitat) and one of the Wild Trout Trust’s famous […]
Author Archive
April 15 2013
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 15 April
Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s new landscape classic Silt Road gets reviewed by Caught by the River, the Telegraph, the Financial Times, Vertigo (Reader in the Rucksack), Some Landscapes and the Wandle Piscators (visit Charles’ website for a list of readings on site in High Wycombe and elsewhere…) Now that’s what we call corporate environmental responsibility: Orvis doubles commitment […]
April 11 2013
Breaking news: Burnley URES wins HLF funding for urban river restoration and public engagement
Great news just in: the Ribble Rivers Trust’s Urban River Enhancement Scheme (URES) in Burnley (which we previously blogged about here and here) has been awarded £674,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Since October 2011, the 18-month development phase of the project, led by Victoria Dewhurst, has already produced a wide range of investigative studies […]
April 7 2013
Urban fly-fishing report (angling celebrity edition): Frome and Nailsworth Stream, Stroud
Having just reviewed Trout in Dirty Places in glowing terms for Trout & Salmon magazine this time last year… … Wild Trout Trust vice-president and all-round great angling writer Jon Beer lost little time in grabbing his fishing gear (and his river restorationist fishing pal Vaughan Lewis) to head for urban-fishy water not too far […]
April 1 2013
City river reads: Silt Road by Charles Rangeley-Wilson
Over the past few weeks we’ve been enjoying an early preview of Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s forthcoming book Silt Road: The Story of a Lost River (due to be published in a couple of days’ time). Loosely structured as a diary of personal pilgrimages through the history of a Chilterns valley, Silt Road tells how the chair-making boom […]
March 25 2013
Guided urban fly-fishing fundraiser: Your chance to crack the Yorkshire Calder?
Readers of Trout in Dirty Places may recall that the Yorkshire Calder has a reputation as a difficult, enigmatic, big-fish river – a place where guides go fishing on their days off. Now, in aid of the Calder & Colne Rivers Trust’s riverfly monitoring training programme, local guide Gary Hyde is teaming up with Nick […]
March 18 2013
Urban fly-fishing report: River Tame, Saddleworth
In bitterly cold conditions that he could only describe afterwards as raining, snowing, sleeting, absolutely everything… … Urbantrout editor-at-large (and key consultant on Trout in Dirty Places) Richard Baker spent his northern opening day fly-fishing the urban upper reaches of the Mersey system controlled by Saddleworth Angling Society. When his fingers had thawed enough to […]
March 15 2013
Urbantrout has a new tag!
Thanks to some amazingly nifty design skillz from our good friends Duncan Soar (urban fly-fisher, IT guru and photographer extraordinaire) and Dominic Skinner (designer of the iconic Dunk Mug) … … the Urbantrout logo has gone all conceptual, weathered and (we reckon) damnably funky. So the only question now is: what else should we do […]
March 7 2013
The Wild Trout Trust charity auction 2013: What’s your urban fly-fishing lot?
This year’s much-anticipated Wild Trout Trust annual fundraising auction has just gone live on ebay. At Urbantrout we know a significant number of anglers who use the auction as a guide to planning their season’s fishing. So when we found ourselves marking up the printed catalogue with all the urban fishing options before saving a list of […]
March 1 2013
Film night: Biosecurity TV
Many of the rivers and streams in our towns and cities have quite enough problems already… so why risk adding any more in the form of invasive species carried by anglers and others who work and play in and around the water? In this inspiring short film that’s already going viral across the internet, Riverfly […]
