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 […]
Archive for the 'UK' Category
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, […]
April 26 2012
Riding the storm: River Chess gets extra STW capacity
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 […]
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 […]
