Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
Earlier this year, the Flyfishers’ Club achieved an amazing coup by acquiring a cased set of six copies of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler – representing all the versions of the book which were published in IW’s own lifetime. To celebrate this momentous addition to the Club’s Library, we somehow persuaded the talented fly-fishing photographer […]
One of the nearly-unavoidable hazards of traditional print production seems to be the way that important details can go out of date almost as soon as the book is published (and this situation has only deteriorated as we’ve started including more and more references to fundamentally ephemeral digital media!) In the case of my own […]
As part of my busy and newly-expanded role with the Wild Trout Trust, where I’m now leading comms activity as well as continuing to develop urban river projects across the south of England, I’ve recently written a couple of articles for the Sportfish website… … describing how WTT’s river restoration projects are focused on improving […]
Mayflies in midwinter: the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal has been landing in the midst of a week-long deep freeze for much of the UK… … but I hope it’ll bring something of the warming hope of a springtime hatch to this beautiful-but-Baltic season. Cyril Bennett is on the front cover, hunting bugs in […]
There’s a definite urban vibe to the latest issue of Fly Culture magazine (step forward, Matt Eastham, Dan Osmond, Nick Thomas and Peter Coleman-Smith!) and for once it hasn’t very much to do with me… … unless you count a little tale which I might have heard in my old south London local (or much […]
On the few occasions when I’ve tried saltwater flyfishing – also known to its real cognoscenti as SWFFing – around the coast of Britain, I’m happy to admit that I’ve not been very successful. Yet if the fish were fairly insignificant (mainly small pollack or coalfish lured up from forests of kelp with sinking lines […]
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 in South Kensington threw us one hell of a party, and for a few days, the weird idea of fishing for trout and grayling in urban rivers was making headlines across the […]
Mayflies must surely constitute some of the most perfect symbolism of a flyfisher’s sport. Beautiful, fragile and famously ephemeral. Patient and enduring, living stoically and nearly-invisibly among dark stones and silt for a year or more… before emerging together into light and air for a celebration of life that seems all the more urgent and […]
As I’ve recently written in the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn newsletter, this is the kind of story that many of us know… A spring, or a line of them, bubbling and gushing out of a rocky hillside. Tumbling downhill, meandering through an upland meadow where trout and bullheads dart above the gravel, and human huts […]
In the past few months I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading about geology, as well as thinking about ways of helping urban rivers now and in the future. So I guess it was slightly inevitable that these themes might emerge in some of my own current writing too… For the latest issue of […]
