From early September 2022 onwards, Pete Tyjas’s famous Fly Culture podcast has been hosting a series of takeovers by The Fishtolian: a mission by Pete Coleman-Smith and Jon Ogborne to find wild brown trout in Bristol, inspired by the Trout in the Trym project. From the series intro: Bristol would never be the first place […]
Author Archive
August 12 2022
Welsh river champions: FF&FT and T&S double up in south Wales
There must be something in the air (or water…) because two of the UK’s leading fly-fishing magazines are visiting the urban rivers of Wales in their September 2022 editions… … Fly-Fishing & Fly Tying tackling the Taff and Rhondda with Terry Bromwell and Charles Jardine, while Trout & Salmon explores the Ebbw with Kieron Jenkins […]
July 4 2022
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 4 July
Citizen science is making a comeback… … and it’s boosting a British river revival (with this 20-year milestone for the Wandle too!) Weir today, gone tomorrow: demolition work starts on the River Kent’s Bowston paper mill weir Tackling plastic pollution with beach cleans in Cornwall, with lots of resonance for urban river restorationists including mental […]
May 19 2022
Fins and Finns: Rewilding Oulujoki and other Nordic rivers
One of the wider Urbantrout team has recently been spending time in the Finnish city of Oulu, and simultaneously we’ve noticed a certain uptick in news from Finland’s urban and otherwise post-industrial rivers (of course, correlation still doesn’t amount to causation, no matter how influential we like to think our various team members really are…) […]
April 30 2022
10 years of Urbantrout and Trout in Dirty Places
This month, it’s 10 years since Trout in Dirty Places launched on a (mostly) unsuspecting world. Merlin Unwin Books and Granger’s fly shop threw us one hell of a party, and for a few days, the weird idea of fishing in urban rivers was making headlines across the media, including the Independent, Radio New Zealand, […]
April 20 2022
Urban fly-fishing report: Rivers Tame and Holme
The UK’s trout fishing season has well and truly opened again… and the Urbantrout crew’s Richard Baker and Adrian Grose-Hodge have just returned from a flying visit to some of our much-loved early season stomping grounds on Manchester’s post-industrial rivers. Fellow urban river stalwarts John O’Brien and Mike Denny joined them for dry fly sport […]
March 21 2022
The Wild Trout Trust charity auction 2022: Back, bigger and badder than ever!
The Wild Trout Trust’s annual auction is back, and this year it’s bigger than ever before, with no less than 366 lots to choose from. One of the gnarliest challenges for any charity is raising long-term core funds which aren’t tightly tied to delivery of very specific short-term projects – and that’s why this fundraising […]
January 17 2022
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 17 January
Want to hatch mayflies in your classroom? The Wild Trout Trust launches an excitingly updated creative science kit… … while Bristol Avon Rivers Trust has been hard at work engaging communities in the Marden valley around Calne Urban rewilding: the Guardian’s view of nature taking over (with bonus link to George Monbiot writing about Trout […]
December 23 2021
Trout & Salmon explores the Yorkshire Calder
Sowerby Bridge might be familiar to you as the the setting for the BBC’s Happy Valley crime drama. It’s also the hometown of Phillippa Hake… one of the new generation of fly-fishers who has taken full advantage of the information age, rapidly ascending the learning curve to become an excellent angler in a relatively short […]
November 29 2021
Film night: Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner…
Fly-fishing is a sport where women are known to excel – the record for the largest UK salmon is still held by Georgina Ballantine! – yet it’s still comparatively rare to see women on the bank. Thankfully, there’s something about the egalitarian nature of urban fishing that seems to attract amazing women to the riverside: […]
