At last week’s Wild Trout Trust Conservation Awards (no urban winners this time, but we salute them all just the same!) many of our fellow river restorationists kept coming back to one fascinating subject of debate… … the massive ongoing project work by the Environment Agency, Groundwork and the Irwell Rivers Trust to restore Manchester’s […]
Archive for the tag 'Fish passage'
May 15 2013
Urban fly-fishing report: Calder, Irwell and Tame
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
November 21 2012
Film night: Fish passage comes to Meadowhall
Rather smaller in scale than the record-breaking demolition of the PNW’s Elwha dams, but probably no less significant for other reasons, is the very recent installation of a £300,000 multi-species technical fish and eel pass on the previously-impassable Hadfield weir in Sheffield. Via the Don Catchment Rivers Trust and A Torn Construction comes this fascinating […]
October 18 2012
Urbantrout sidecasts: Thursday 18 October
Gravel cleaning, cake and urban fishing: just another World Rivers Day in south London Even more London stuff: the Wandle’s first finished rock ramp fish pass, Thames 21’s Cleaner Thames Challenge, and the Wandle Trust’s call for education volunteers Love your river: hosted by Thames Water and the River Chess Association, double Olympic rowing gold […]
September 2 2012
Weir, what weir? Bolton’s Croal shows us how it’s done…
As any fule kno experienced river restorationist knows, there’s really not much point in trying to work against a river’s natural processes: in the end it’ll do what it wants to do anyhow, so you might as well just get out of the way. Which is why we’ve been so brim-full delighted to read the latest […]
