Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
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 […]
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 […]
Four years ago, give or take a few days, Sally and I took our final walk up the Wandle to hand over our keys to the estate agent who’d (mostly) been helping us to sell our house by the river in Carshalton. As much out of habit as conscious farewell, we stopped and peered over […]
Throughout the Covid-19 lockdown and subsequent restrictions here in the UK, lots of brands have made a special effort to stay connected with their customers through digital channels – and fishing shops have been no exception to this trend. Early in the lockdown, Farlows’ Jonny Muir took the opportunity to start a series of in-depth […]
During these strange days of lockdown (in the course of which I’ve been temporarily furloughed from my Wild Trout Trust urban river role), we’ve all started adapting to new ways of working. Formal meetings and family gatherings alike have moved onto digital platforms, where it’s likely that many of them will stay for the foreseeable […]
The end of last month saw the culmination of much of my Trout in the Town work so far: holding the Wild Trout Trust’s latest Urban Conclave, and launching our new Urban River Toolkit. When Merlin Unwin published Trout in Dirty Places, my guide to urban river fishing and restoration, in 2012, it was everything […]
When he’s presenting the judges’ verdicts at the Wild Trout Trust Conservation Awards every year, my colleague Paul Gaskell likes to emphasise the odds that are stacked against even the simplest river restoration projects – making it nearly impossible to believe that the spectacular and complicated ones have actually made it through this vicious (and […]
This month, working with the Wild Trout Trust has meant happily converging several different strands of my professional interests (again) and helping to promote the brilliant annual Wild Trout Trust charity auction. As I’ve said once or twice on my Urbantrout site, it’s clear that more and more fly-fishers are using the WTT auction as […]
Over on my Urbantrout site, I’ve just published an announcement of the first edition of Pete Tyjas’s new print magazine, Fly Culture, which launched at Farlows on Thursday 13 September. Talking to editors on the UK magazine scene over the last ten years or so, I’ve had the distinct impression that the traditional monthly publication […]
