From the source of the Thames in a green and pleasant land to dark satanic mills, the forging of the Five Rings and the invention of the www that enables blogs like this, Danny Boyle’s awe-inspiring “Isles of Wonder” charts the transformation of Britain by the world’s first Industrial Revolution (But… did someone forget to […]
Archive for the tag 'London'
July 20 2012
Film night: Urban river habitat improvement
For several years the Wild Trout Trust has been working closely with the Wandle Trust to improve habitat for trout and other species on South London’s most famous urban chalkstream. In this excellent little case study video, filmed last autumn by Fish On Productions, Trout in the Town programme manager Paul Gaskell (yes, it’s that […]
July 14 2012
Urban getaway: Winchester
With most of the Wandle running high, coloured and functionally un-fly-fishable for weeks (thanks to persistent pulses of urban runoff from surrounding square miles of roads, car parks and paved front gardens, to say nothing of randomly-clustered diesel and cooking oil spillages), one or two Wandle Piscators needed a break. So we took one …
July 11 2012
Urbantrout sidecasts: Wednesday 11 July
Urban flooding: UK government advisers point the finger at celebrity gardeners Double trouble for the Wandle: First red diesel, now cooking oil Revitalising urban rivers: Bella Davies, Angela Gurnell and Dave Webb talk to NERC in South London Trout in the distillery? Paul Gaskell dispenses wise habitat advice in Oban Big brown water on the Kelvin: […]
June 6 2012
Breaking news: Thames Water’s £400k for the Crane
It’s been months in the making… but finally comes news of a breakthrough in the negotiations on north west London’s River Crane. As this Thames Anglers’ Conservancy report reminds us, the river suffered a catastrophic sewage spill at the end of October last year when a 6-tonne penstock jammed in Thames Water’s main sewage pipe […]
May 25 2012
Trout in the Classroom 2012: South London’s carnival of the alevins
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
