Having spent the last couple of years travelling around the UK, visiting the Wild Trout Trust’s Trout in the Town chapters and investigating the state of our urban rivers at the start of the 21st century, I’ve come to the startling but joyful conclusion that there’s probably now more water in and around our towns […]
Author Archive
June 23 2012
Miracle on the Irwell
It’s all happening in Media City. Just a few days after Nick Carter’s big lunchbreak trout hit the blogosphere, ITV News has aired this 2-minute local spot charting the Irwell’s recovery over the past 30 years, thanks largely to the (uncredited) Mersey Basin Campaign. Chub, trout and several Salford Friendly Anglers are briefly interviewed… This is […]
June 15 2012
Lunch break trout
Is it possible to catch a trout on your lunch break in Manchester city centre? As existential questions go, this one has clearly been haunting Salford Friendly Anglers‘ co-founder Nick Carter for a while. But after surviving at least one close encounter with something of the Mancunian night (hint: it’s 18 stone and wears a […]
June 6 2012
Breaking news: Thames Water’s £400k for the Crane
It’s been months in the making… but finally comes news of a breakthrough in the negotiations on north west London’s River Crane. As this Thames Anglers’ Conservancy report reminds us, the river suffered a catastrophic sewage spill at the end of October last year when a 6-tonne penstock jammed in Thames Water’s main sewage pipe […]
May 25 2012
Trout in the Classroom 2012: South London’s carnival of the alevins
As we’ve almost come to expect here in South London, this year’s Wandle Trust Trout in the Classroom programme went off with a bang… and a triumphant release day in Morden Hall Park filmed by Philip Williams, covered by the BBC and now reported on the Wandle Trust website. It’s always inspirational to see the next […]
May 18 2012
Film night: Jazz and urban fly-fishing in Oslo
Via those krazy kats of the Nordic Jazz & Fly Fishing collective comes this outstanding video of trout spawning in the centre of Oslo. As guitarist-presenter Havard Stubo says: “It’s like the Kola Peninsula or something, and I’m just two minutes from a bar!” Urban fly-fishing in Norway… maybe last month’s enquiry about stocking Trout […]
May 10 2012
Blogging it large in Bakewell…
What happens when Stanton’s leading river restorationist, Mick Martin, takes an evening off from his beloved River Erewash Foundation to pound the pavements of Bakewell on the legendary Derbyshire Wye? Dry Fly Expert Richard Ward comes to the rescue and shows us the football-shaped, rainbow-hued goods… (Photo: Richard Ward)
May 5 2012
Urban fly-fishing: 10 top rivers in FF&FT
Sixteen miles upriver from central Manchester, between the cricket ground and the carpet factory in Ramsbottom, the early-season Irwell surges with smooth, deceptive power. Raindrops splash into eddies along the banks, and a hatch of dark olives tacks across the leaden surface. Under those little grey sailboats, the trout I’ve just hooked on a dead-drifted […]
May 1 2012
Trout in the Town: Eat Sleep Fish tells the back story
If you’ve ever wondered in an idle moment how the UK’s urban river restoration movement really got started, this freshly-minted cometh-the-hour-cometh-the-man interview with the Wild Trout Trust’s Trout in the Town project manager Paul Gaskell will probably tell you all you need to know. (Fair warning: as I’ve just suggested in this cross-post over on […]
April 30 2012
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 30 April
Trout on the Tube: BBC Newsround’s report on this year’s Wandle Trust Trout in the Classroom releases, still playing on the CBBC web channel Trout in the Town: Full bios of all urban river restoration chapters, as part of the Wild Trout Trust’s long-awaited full-site reload Sheffield rivers run free: The Sheffield Star namechecks Paul Gaskell, […]
