Urban wildlife through the lens: south London photographer Tomos Brangwyn shoots a Wandle / Ravensbourne inner-city kingfisher story for the Daily Mail Salford Friendly Anglers win the Angling Trust’s 2014 Fred J Taylor Award for their work on the Irwell catchment New research from Cardiff University shows pollution-sensitive species recolonising urban rivers… … but it’s […]
Author Archive
July 21 2014
Pic of the day: Urban sofa fishing
En route to this year’s CLA Game Fair (where he spent the weekend selling his new range of flies for coarse fish and signing copies of his latest book Canal Fishing)… … our good friend Dom Garnett stopped off in Leicester to explore the Soar with local expert ‘Skateboard Dave’ Egginton… … and found this […]
July 8 2014
Vote for URES in this year’s National Lottery Awards!
Regular readers of this blog may recall that we’ve been keenly following the progress of the Ribble Rivers Trust’s HLF-funded URES project (the video above shows just a few aspects of their wide-ranging community engagement and river restoration efforts, and there are regular photo updates on the RRT’s Facebook page). URES has already proved totally […]
June 30 2014
Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing: Signed copies now available in the Urbantrout shop
Just a heads up to let our readers know that signed copies of the newly-published Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing are now available from the Urbantrout online store (along with lots of other great eco-branded merchandise!) Here’s how Andrew Herd, eminent author of The Fly and many other definitive works, recently reviewed Balsam Bashing: If ever […]
June 23 2014
Urban fly-fishing report: Rea Brook, Shrewsbury
Armed with his trusty Orvis Superfine one-weight (possibly the Official Favourite Ultralight Flyrod of the Urbantrout movement?) Trout in Dirty Places reader Spencer Clayton has sent us another excellent report and evocative set of photos from the Rea Brook’s hidden valley on the outskirts of Shrewsbury: Today I arrived at the Rea at 12pm after a short […]
June 16 2014
Urban fly-tying: Martin’s Minnow
If there’s one fly pattern that’s taken the UK’s fishing world by storm this season, it’s this deceptively simple minnow jig pattern designed and tied by Huddersfield’s Martin Smith. Martin’s Minnow has already notched up impressive scorelines as far afield as Scotland and the Derbyshire Dove (and a starring role in an article by Glen […]
June 6 2014
Film night: Fishing the Dodder in Dublin
The moment when we realised that good trout really were starting to return to the Wandle is vividly burned into the Urbantrout team’s collective memory here in south London. It was April 2008: we were just getting ready for the first big Wandle Piscators’ annual club dinner, and one of us found a truly sensational […]
May 19 2014
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 19 May
Into the Dalek zone: Urbantrout and Trout in Dirty Places reader (and urban steelheader beanie wearer) Ian Firkins goes exploring Braunton’s little River Caen INJAF’s Suzanne Constance presents a brilliant step-by-step on Kingston University’s habitat restoration project on the Hogsmill with the South East Rivers Trust One Big River: Paul Gaskell reports on the launch […]
May 6 2014
The Urbantrout Diaries: Taking the fight to invasive non-native species
Just in case you missed it last week, the latest instalment of the Urbantrout Diaries series went live on Thursday, revealing some of the background and thinking behind the soon-to-be-published guide to tackling invasive non-native species entitled Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing: Even whilst relishing the totally counterintuitive wonder of urban fly-fishing, a sense of […]
May 5 2014
Bank holiday special: Trout in Dirty Places caps
Whilst going through the Urbantrout warehouse this bank holiday weekend, we came across a small box of special edition Trout in Dirty Places caps, originally designed to celebrate the launch of the book back in 2012. For good measure we’ve just added an exclusive Urbantrout looped tag to each one – and for a limited […]
