This month, it’s 10 years since Trout in Dirty Places launched on a (mostly) unsuspecting world. Merlin Unwin Books and Granger’s fly shop threw us one hell of a party, and for a few days, the weird idea of fishing in urban rivers was making headlines across the media, including the Independent, Radio New Zealand, […]
Archive for the tag 'Fly-fishing'
April 20 2022
Urban fly-fishing report: Rivers Tame and Holme
The UK’s trout fishing season has well and truly opened again… and the Urbantrout crew’s Richard Baker and Adrian Grose-Hodge have just returned from a flying visit to some of our much-loved early season stomping grounds on Manchester’s post-industrial rivers. Fellow urban river stalwarts John O’Brien and Mike Denny joined them for dry fly sport […]
March 21 2022
The Wild Trout Trust charity auction 2022: Back, bigger and badder than ever!
The Wild Trout Trust’s annual auction is back, and this year it’s bigger than ever before, with no less than 366 lots to choose from. One of the gnarliest challenges for any charity is raising long-term core funds which aren’t tightly tied to delivery of very specific short-term projects – and that’s why this fundraising […]
January 17 2022
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 17 January
Want to hatch mayflies in your classroom? The Wild Trout Trust launches an excitingly updated creative science kit… … while Bristol Avon Rivers Trust has been hard at work engaging communities in the Marden valley around Calne Urban rewilding: the Guardian’s view of nature taking over (with bonus link to George Monbiot writing about Trout […]
December 23 2021
Trout & Salmon explores the Yorkshire Calder
Sowerby Bridge might be familiar to you as the the setting for the BBC’s Happy Valley crime drama. It’s also the hometown of Phillippa Hake… one of the new generation of fly-fishers who has taken full advantage of the information age, rapidly ascending the learning curve to become an excellent angler in a relatively short […]
November 29 2021
Film night: Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner…
Fly-fishing is a sport where women are known to excel – the record for the largest UK salmon is still held by Georgina Ballantine! – yet it’s still comparatively rare to see women on the bank. Thankfully, there’s something about the egalitarian nature of urban fishing that seems to attract amazing women to the riverside: […]
October 17 2021
Fly Fishing & Fly Tying: Urban fishing in Winchester
There’s no doubt that Winchester is one of the all-time-classic urban fishing destinations – since we saw that rippling chalkstream along the city’s Roman walls, we’ve loved it ourselves, never mind eulogising it in Trout in Dirty Places – and the latest issue of Fly Fishing & Fly Tying tells the story of how Cumbrian […]
September 24 2021
Fly Culture: Tinworks trout on the Taff
Here at Urbantrout we’re huge fans of Fly Culture magazine, a quarterly publication ‘journal of high quality writing and photographs that capture the essence of what fly fishing means to us all’. The autumn 2021 issue features a story from a stretch of river that’s frankly new to us: Melingriffith on the Taff, where the […]
July 10 2021
Urban fly-fishing report: River Sheaf, Sheffield
Professional sports photographer Duncan Philpott recently spent a few hours with a fishing pal on one of Sheffield’s many city streams. Naturally, he took his camera along to capture some shots of the whole experience – and best of all, he’s now given us permission to use a few of them here on Urbantrout. It’s […]
June 5 2021
Fly Fishing & Fly Tying: Glasgow’s urban wilderness
Maybe we’ve not been paying proper attention, but some reason it feels like a while since we spotted a full-on urban fishing feature in one of the leading print magazines. Whatever the case… it’s been a real pleasure to pick up the July issue of Fly Fishing & Fly Tying, and find an article by […]