Great news this morning from the River Chess in north west London, where Thames Water have just doubled the stormwater storage capacity of their Chesham sewage treatment works. The River Chess Association was formed in 2009 in direct response to local concerns about “black water” discharges from these works, whose headwater location often contributes more than […]
Author Archive
April 20 2012
Fly-fishing as urban exploration
(Photo: UK Urbex Forums) If you subscribe to the online-paywalled Sunday Times (which we don’t, preferring to go all retro-printy instead for one day a week), you may already have seen last weekend’s fascinating analysis of the now-not-so-underground concept of urban exploration. The gonzo challenge of exploring and documenting the forbidden spaces of decommissioned factories, […]
April 11 2012
Wood and water: LWD on the BBC
Woody debris on the radio… who knew the tools of river restoration geekdom could get so publicly funky? Following Good Friday’s post-industrial fly-fishing extravaganza on the Wandle, another programme took to the airwaves yesterday morning: this time exploring the role of large and coarse woody debris in renaturalising river systems both rural and urban. Clearly, as Angela […]
April 10 2012
Trout in Dirty Places hits the headlines
As I confessed on my personal blog just before the official launch of Trout in Dirty Places, it’s difficult to deny that I didn’t sit down all those months ago and plan to write a book which might appeal to a wider audience than the usual fly-fishing community. But there’s planning, and then there’s what […]
March 28 2012
Film night: The case against micro hydro
Via the Waterfeature blog (tagline: giving a dam about micro hydro) and this thread on the Fly Forums comes a highly informative film, including interviews with experts Paul Gaskell, Chris Firth and David Buttle, warning about the harmful effects of the new wave of micro hydro schemes on rivers like Sheffield’s Don. Kelham Island Hydro […]
March 21 2012
Rebuilding a river: The Wandle in Carshalton
Whenever somebody asks me what’s the best example of urban river restoration you know? I always tell them about the upper Wandle. Right across the road from my own front door, the ancient weir at Butter Hill Mill has probably impounded this stretch of chalkstream for at least 700 years. By the nineteenth century, a complex […]
March 14 2012
Why?
Trout only live in beautiful places. It’s an idea that’s been trotted out by countless angling writers. But it’s no longer totally true. Since the 1980s, when the western world’s heavy industry began its long march east, and governments woke up to the importance of environmental stewardship, the lines have started to blur. Better sewage […]
