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 [...]
Archive for the 'Europe' Category
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 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 [...]
March 18 2013
Urban fly-fishing report: River Tame, Saddleworth
In bitterly cold conditions that he could only describe afterwards as raining, snowing, sleeting, absolutely everything… … Urbantrout editor-at-large (and key consultant on Trout in Dirty Places) Richard Baker spent his northern opening day fly-fishing the urban upper reaches of the Mersey system controlled by Saddleworth Angling Society. When his fingers had thawed enough to [...]
March 15 2013
Urbantrout has a new tag!
Thanks to some amazingly nifty design skillz from our good friends Duncan Soar (urban fly-fisher, IT guru and photographer extraordinaire) and Dominic Skinner (designer of the iconic Dunk Mug) … … the Urbantrout logo has gone all conceptual, weathered and (we reckon) damnably funky. So the only question now is: what else should we do [...]
March 1 2013
Film night: Biosecurity TV
Many of the rivers and streams in our towns and cities have quite enough problems already… so why risk adding any more in the form of invasive species carried by anglers and others who work and play in and around the water? In this inspiring short film that’s already going viral across the internet, Riverfly [...]
February 25 2013
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 25 February
Midcurrent reviews the latest Orvis fly-fishing sling pack (we’re loving the digital camo colourway for stealthy urban ops… stay tuned for something special!) Retreat from trouble: the Porter Brook’s native white-clawed crayfish are evacuated from Sheffield city centre to a high-altitude ark site somewhere in the surrounding Pennines A few miles upstream from that tunnel, [...]
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 [...]
November 2 2012
Film night: Toxic bioaccumulation in post-industrial rivers… are urban fish safe to eat?
This is an issue that’s kept UK-based river restorationists awake at night for years – but never with quite enough evidence to convince regulatory colleagues that toxic bioaccumulation of arsenic, mercury, PCBs, endocrine-disrupting flame retardants and other contaminants probably works the same at the apex of our inland waterways’ food webs as it does in [...]
