on 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 75% of the river’s total flow.  Huge efforts have been made to create a strong working relationship with the water company, and RCA chairman Paul Jennings is overjoyed at this latest success (which couldn’t come at a better time, given the succession of autumnal-type low-pressure systems currently tracking across Britain, dumping inches of runoff into antiquated combined sewage and stormwater systems everywhere). 

“Since we introduced a text warning system for the works, more than a year ago, there hasn’t been a single sewage overflow incident,” Paul tells me, “and this extra capacity will greatly reduce the risk of future discharges. It’s also particularly important at times like this when the Chess is suffering like many other London chalkstreams from low flows and a shortage of water in its aquifer. We’ll continue to work with Thames Water on water quality issues, and like the river restoration work we’re proposing for the Chess further downstream in Rickmansworth, it’s one step at a time. But this is a really important one!”

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on 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, derelict hospitals and abandoned culverts isn’t new. But urbex started making headlines again last week when a group called the London Consolidation Crew scaled the 1000-foot Shard, currently London’s tallest skyscraper building site, and posted images of their climb on the internet. 

As the Sunday Times’ feature suggests, some areas of urbex can shade uncomfortably into trespass and security issues… and we probably shouldn’t even try to help you make your mind up about those. Instead, what we really find interesting is how closely many urban explorers’ thrill-seeking matches the haunted fascination felt by city-centre fly-fishers in reclaiming forgotten reaches of post-industrial rivers that remain inaccessible and fundamentally meaningless to the rest of society.

For instance, in the words of the London Consolidation Crew’s spokesman Dan on his recent ascent of the Shard: “There’s very little left on land to be discovered, and something that’s only just been constructed is the closest you’ll get to uncharted territories. Maybe this is the new wilderness?”

Meanwhile, Professor David Clarke of the University of Swansea suggests that the urban exploration movement is “part of a proliferation of new ways to try to experience the city… not just for political reasons but also to experience a freedom. It’s also a response to the fact that society has become ever more risk averse, ever more bland and boring.”

Read the introduction to my new book Trout in Dirty Places, and you’ll find some remarkably similar sentiments, right down to my assertion that “fly-fishing’s most fulfilling new frontier may be no further than the end of your street… in a post-industrial wilderness as unique as the hills of Assynt, Patagonia or the Kola Peninsula… truly a foreign country in your own backyard.” 

As urban fly-fishers we sometimes like to think we’re kinda unique… but could it actually be we’re part of something even bigger than we thought?

And maybe most importantly: what size are the fish down there?

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on 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 Gurnell (Queen Mary University) and Alistair Driver (the Environment Agency) both emphasise, woody debris of any kind needs to be used very carefully in the urban landscape.

But under the right set of circumstances, such as the Disley and New Mills trial stretch of the Goyt, well-secured LWD can actually help to reduce peak flood flows by slowing floodwaters’ conveyance to bottlenecks like vulnerable bridges, or even diverting peak flows into flood retention areas where a few days’ extra inundation doesn’t cause a problem. (Hell, in these drought-hit times, it might even help a little more water infiltrate to the aquifer…)

As usual with the BBC iPlayer, the programme won’t be there forever… but catch it while you can!

(Photo: thanks to Duncan Soar)

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on 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 actually happens… and fortunately the idea of restoring and fly-fishing rivers that once ran black with coal dust and sewage really does seem to have plugged into something  Zeitgeist-y in the media. 

Click on over to theopike.com for links to radio interviews, webcasts, news stories, book reviews and more!

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on 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 from Waterfeature on Vimeo.

At a time when most of the rest of the world is waking up to the damage done by dams and turbines, and even starting to decommission and remove them, this is a measured, in-depth consideration of how post-industrial rivers across the UK are threatened by economically-dubious low-head hydropower installations.

Well worth 22 minutes’ watching, especially if you really are in favour of properly green, sustainable forms of energy generation…

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on 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 of foundries, paper mills, corn mills and watercress beds had emphatically erased all vestiges of the river’s original upper course.

At least two of these sites were eventually converted into chemical factories, and the picturesque old millpond was canalised into a single concrete culvert through BP’s Mill Lane works. According to long-time local residents, cages of trout were periodically suspended in this channel to test the water quality. The sooner they died, the more urgently someone needed to check the discharges of hydrocarbons and vinyl compounds into the river…

But when the factories finally closed around 1995, and the area began to be redeveloped for housing, the newly-formed Environment Agency grasped the opportunity to try some real river restoration. After more than a metre of contaminated soil had been scraped off the whole site, project manager Dave Webb began rebuilding the river from the gravels up: replacing one concrete bank with gabion baskets, regrading the other and planting willows, poplars, sedges and other riparian vegetation. Ranunculus, watercress, forget-me-not and mint drifted down from Grove Park, and the gravels were colonised by bullhead, stickleback and stone loach.

Fifteen years later, this stretch of the Wandle is still one of the biggest paradoxes we know. Highly urbanised and horribly over-abstracted, only the local water company’s unique recirculation system actually keeps it flowing at all – yet you can almost guarantee to see a kingfisher flashing along this cool green corridor any day of the week, and the Butter Hill wheel pool holds a small population of determinedly spawning Trout in the Classroom graduates.

As a result, the Wandle’s Carshalton arm probably represents the region’s first best hope of getting an urban water body up to Good Ecological Potential for the purposes of the Water Framework Directive, and the Wandle Trust and Wild Trout Trust have been steadily enhancing this whole reach over the past two years: reducing small stilling weirs to improve fish passage, installing large woody debris and more than 60 tonnes of gravel, and generally trying to max out the habitat in preparation for kick-starting a self-sustaining population of truly wild trout.

In short, as Dave’s before and after photos show… given time and determination, there’s quite literally nothing you can’t do to rebuild an urban river…

(Photos: thanks to Dave Webb)

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on 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 treatment and pollution control meant better water quality. As a result, rivers that once terrorised generations of local residents with their reputation for contamination and pestilence started flowing comparatively clean and pure, even if their banks were still shrouded in concrete and sheet-steel piling.

And the trout noticed, dropping down from holdover headwaters and other refugia on the outskirts of industry, recolonising areas which probably hadn’t seen an adipose fin for centuries.

This is a measure of how far urban rivers have come – and how far they’ve still got to go.

Long into the deep twilight of heavy industry, vast lengths of our post-industrial rivers are still broken up by weirs, polluted by urban runoff and overspilling sewers, and treated as flowing rubbish tips. Yet the trout have returned. And now, within the European Union at least, legislation like the Water Framework Directive means we have to make sure they stay.

Once or twice, whilst researching Trout in Dirty Places, my snapshot of urban river restoration in the UK at the start of the 21st century, I wondered if I’d stumbled into an extra-ironic edition of Crap Towns or Boring Postcards: that brilliant little booklet recording some of the worst excesses of 1960s planning, when the buried emotions of wartime made it easier to level everything that the Luftwaffe hadn’t, and all that space-age concrete was new.

50 years on, you’ve got to look hard to see the beauty in a stained, rust-streaked culvert behind a hostile chain-link fence, or find the river still running beyond rolling retail car parks and half-refurbished mills. But searching for Trout in Dirty Places eventually led me to my own credo: that no place where trout live can ever be truly ugly.

Wild salmonids like trout and grayling beautify the places where they live, just with the fact of their sensitive, evanescent presence. Especially in places where lots of logic still tells you that they shouldn’t really be.

But they are.

If this knowledge-sharing website helps more people to help more wild trout to live in more urban rivers, and more of those people to catch the trout and return them reverently to the water with a sense of mission fulfilled, I think we can go home happy.

That’s all.

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