Rivers of flame: memories of when the Irwell and Cuyahoga caught fire How the £3.6 million SUNRISE project (£2.1 million co-funded by the EU’s Regional Development Fund) promises to transform Staffordshire’s urban rivers Fresh outta Portland: fishing for city bass in the shadow of skyscrapers Bring up the bodies (and shopping trolleys, cafe chairs, mobile […]
Author Archive
July 5 2019
Pic of the day: Trout outta Colliers Wood
One important aspect of the Environment Agency’s regular fisheries work involves electrofishing to monitor fish populations, and their schedule this year has just brought them back to the River Wandle at Colliers Wood. And among more than 600 fish including barbel, chub, dace, roach, gudgeon and eels, they’ve reported catching this awesome little wild trout. […]
June 12 2019
Trout in the Town: Rocking out in Bruton
Trout in the Town is the Wild Trout Trust’s project to help community groups look after their local rivers in towns and cities across the UK. In recent months (and off and on since 2015) the Trust has been working with the Brue CREW community group in Somerset, as part of the award-winning Hills to […]
May 9 2019
Pic of the day: Tunnel vision on the Irwell
One of the recurring bonus features of urban fishing is being able to get up close and personal with post-industrial pieces of architecture that few other people ever manage to see… This year, the Urbantrout team kicked off the trout fishing season on Manchester’s rivers, for the first time in several years. A mere few […]
April 1 2019
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 1 April
Rivers of plastic: why so many urban river projects have been running community cleanups every month for more than 15 years (and why we need to carry on!) How Helsinki’s Longinoja project won the Finnish Biodiversity Award 2017-18 Urban forests for Scotland’s post-industrial wastelands Red river backwards: a letter from Berlin’s River Spree Putting numbers […]
March 9 2019
The Wild Trout Trust charity auction 2019: Bid for a season of urban fishing adventures!
Regular readers of Urbantrout will probably know that the Wild Trout Trust auction, which takes place at the start of trout fishing season in the UK each year, is the charity’s biggest annual fundraising event. Of course, the fundraising aspect alone would be reason enough for us to support this legendary event. But it’s a […]
February 20 2019
Film night: Longinoja, from gutter to creek
Among European river menders, the restoration of Longinoja brook has become a textbook example of local activism persuading local communities and public bodies alike to start valuing a little urban stream again. Flowing through the Finnish city of Helsinki, this important sea-trout spawning tributary of the Vantaanjoki River was historically dredged and otherwise modified […]
January 24 2019
Fly Culture: Not all who Wandle are lost
Throwing it back to where the UK’s Trout in the Town movement began, Farlows fishing manager Tom Clinton writes in the second issue of Fly Culture magazine… … revealing how the Wandle’s spectacular wild trout became a compulsion for him in 2018: Like a mad obsessive from a conspiracy movie, the Wandle trout became all […]
January 14 2019
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 14 January
Speeding into 2019: Wincanton’s CATCH crew clean up the Cale… … while River Holme Connections volunteers line up the scooters in Huddersfield! Salmon in dirty places? Spotting migratory fish on Taunton’s River Tone New year, new fightback: helping British rivers repel invasive non-native species… … and here’s INNS researcher Zara Pattison again with latest news […]
December 23 2018
Happy Christmas from Urbantrout!
Since joining the Wild Trout Trust this year to work on developing Trout in the Town projects across the south of England, it’s been a little quieter here on Urbantrout (cramming 9 days into every 7 can make that happen, apparently…) But readers of Urbantrout can rest assured that, among the uncertainty of Brexit and […]