With successive weather fronts blowing in from the Atlantic, flexibility and a functioning sense of humour were just enough to bring success when the Urbantrout team visited northern Manchester’s river systems last weekend. Starting our campaign on one of those classically post-industrial Calder tributaries, we indulged our passion for urban exploration to find bruiser trout [...]
Author Archive
May 10 2013
Film night: Wandle mills and the lessons of hydropower history
This being the UK’s National Mills Weekend, we thought we’d take this opportunity to show an intriguing little film which recently came to our attention, thanks to the excellent Wandle Industrial Museum. Almost 12 minutes of footage (somewhat hauntingly, no soundtrack) show several Wandle mill wheels still turning at some time during the 1960s or [...]
May 7 2013
Rivers by Design: A new primer for urban and post-industrial river restorationists everywhere
Last week’s annual River Restoration Centre conference was buzzing with conversation about an exciting new publication by the EU LIFE+ funded RESTORE partnership project: the Rivers by Design manual. Rivers by Design is subtitled A guide for planners, developers, architects and landscape architects on maximising the benefits of river restoration. So it was always likely [...]
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 the Cale) 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 [...]
April 7 2013
Urban fly-fishing report (angling celebrity edition): Frome and Nailsworth Stream, Stroud
Having just reviewed Trout in Dirty Places in glowing terms for Trout & Salmon magazine this time last year… … Wild Trout Trust vice-president and all-round great angling writer Jon Beer lost little time in grabbing his fishing gear (and his river restorationist fishing pal Vaughan Lewis) to head for urban-fishy water not too far [...]
April 1 2013
City river reads: Silt Road by Charles Rangeley-Wilson
Over the past few weeks we’ve been enjoying an early preview of Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s forthcoming book Silt Road: The Story of a Lost River (due to be published in a couple of days’ time). Loosely structured as a diary of personal pilgrimages through the history of a Chilterns valley, Silt Road tells how the chair-making boom [...]
March 25 2013
Guided urban fly-fishing fundraiser: Your chance to crack the Yorkshire Calder?
Readers of Trout in Dirty Places may recall that the Yorkshire Calder has a reputation as a difficult, enigmatic, big-fish river – a place where guides go fishing on their days off. Now, in aid of the Calder & Colne Rivers Trust’s riverfly monitoring training programme, local guide Gary Hyde is teaming up with Nick [...]
