After this year’s CLA Game Fair at Ragley Hall, the Urbantrout team went on the road for a week in a heatwave in the Welsh Marches… … fishing the Teme with publisher Merlin Unwin in a spectacular gorge near Leintwardine, vainly scanning the steaming surface of the same river further downstream in Ludlow for any […]
Archive for the tag 'Rewilding'
June 14 2013
Film night: Resilience and sharing a sense of place
Via the Wild Trout Trust’s Trout in the Town blog comes this superb video from the recent Urban River Champions’ Conclave, hosted 3 weekends ago by Salford Friendly Anglers. Over 40 minutes, keynote speaker (and urban tenkara fisher, blade-runner and river restorationist) Phil Sheridan tells a quietly riveting story of global travel, personal resilience, and […]
May 21 2013
Urban river projects: Celebrating our successes (and why there’s no such thing as inevitability)
Ahead of this weekend’s third biennial Urban River Conclave, co-ordinated by the Wild Trout Trust and hosted by Salford Friendly Anglers, the WTT’s most excellent Paul Gaskell has posted this thoughtful piece on his Trout in the Town blog. Last year, he admits, he spent a lot of time drawing together an application to the […]
April 25 2013
Trout in the Classroom: Rewilding kids and rivers
This time last week, environmental writer-campaigner George Monbiot (personal mottos: Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable and Unreconstructed idealist, professional troublemaker) visited south London’s River Wandle to watch the Wandle Trust’s Trout in the Classroom trout fry release by local urban schoolkids in Morden Hall Park. His feature about the project and its wider implications […]
April 11 2013
Breaking news: Burnley URES wins HLF funding for urban river restoration and public engagement
Great news just in: the Ribble Rivers Trust’s Urban River Enhancement Scheme (URES) in Burnley (which we previously blogged about here and here) has been awarded £674,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Since October 2011, the 18-month development phase of the project, led by Victoria Dewhurst, has already produced a wide range of investigative studies […]
February 8 2013
Film night: Getting wet feet in Burnley
As the clocks slowly tick down towards those HLF announcements, the Ribble Rivers Trust has just released this volunteer-produced video demonstrating how much impact the URES initiative has already had amongst the communities of Burnley as part of the Ribble Life project. It’s an excellent 7-minute summary of how such a project can begin to […]
December 20 2012
Urban river funding plans for Burnley and south London: Why we’re crossing everything for 2013…
For many rivers trusts and river restoration groups across the UK, the last working week before Christmas has been a blur of deadlines: final drafts of reports on projects successfully completed, budgets and planning for work running up to the end of the financial year, and plans and applications for projects somewhere out there in […]
June 23 2012
Miracle on the Irwell
It’s all happening in Media City. Just a few days after Nick Carter’s big lunchbreak trout hit the blogosphere, ITV News has aired this 2-minute local spot charting the Irwell’s recovery over the past 30 years, thanks largely to the (uncredited) Mersey Basin Campaign. Chub, trout and several Salford Friendly Anglers are briefly interviewed… This is […]
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 […]