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 […]
Archive for the tag 'Volunteers'
May 21 2013
Urban river projects: Celebrating our successes (and why there’s no such thing as inevitability)
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 22 2013
Film night: Surveying Wincanton’s River Cale
What does the birth of an urban river restoration project look like? In the case of the little River Cale in Wincanton, everything seems to have started with a few beers in somebody’s garage, swiftly followed by a suitable acronym (CATCH: Community Action to Transform Cale Habitat) and one of the Wild Trout Trust’s famous […]
April 15 2013
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 15 April
Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s new landscape classic Silt Road gets reviewed by Caught by the River, the Telegraph, the Financial Times, Vertigo (Reader in the Rucksack), Some Landscapes and the Wandle Piscators (visit Charles’ website for a list of readings on site in High Wycombe and elsewhere…) Now that’s what we call corporate environmental responsibility: Orvis doubles commitment […]
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 […]
January 21 2013
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 21 January
From Seattle to Atlanta via Boston, Denver and Salt Lake City, a new study by the United States Geological Survey examines the varying effects of urbanisation on different stream and river ecosystems … while the UK’s Environment Agency commits to massive £3.5 million deculverting of the River Roch in Rochdale’s historic centre (extra BBC footage […]
January 9 2013
Challenge Buxton 2013: Who’s up for restoring the top of the Derbyshire Wye?
Even the smartest towns sometimes have dirty places, down the inaccessible backs of car parks and petrol stations… and in those places you’ll often find trout! In truth, this particular dirty place was hard to miss when I visited the top of the Derbyshire Wye at the start of last season: an outsize plunge pool […]
December 15 2012
Urbantrout sidecasts: Saturday 15 December
Urban fishing bonus: starlings throw shapes in the winter sky over Taunton’s Obridge viaduct (above, via the Daily Mail) Discover tenkara: Paul Gaskell, John Pearson and Stuart Crofts host a have-a-go day for Sheffield’s SPRITE volunteers The Wandle Trust wins £1m+ funding for Water Framework Directive-related urban river restoration across south London City centre salmon […]
November 12 2012
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 12 November
Kranj time for trophy hunters: urban huchen fishing revealed on Slovenia’s legendary Sava (top tip: arm up with 8-10 weights or heavier) US-based Clean Water Future’s community engagement crowd-funding model brings Kickstarter-style fundraising to river restoration Bakewell or bust: 3 Wandle Piscators sample street-fishing on the Derbyshire Wye Shaun Leonard, Paul Gaskell, Tim Jacklin and […]
