Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
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 […]
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 […]
As the start of trout season creeps round again, I’m feeling incredibly proud and privileged to feature in the latest issue of the beautiful Fly Culture print magazine – this time alongside work from Richard Baker, Adrian Grose-Hodge, Henry Giles, Ben Jailler, Matt Eastham, Dan Osmond and many others. Editor Pete Tyjas asked me to […]
Mere decades ago, these were waters that still ran black with coal dust and the toxic effluent of steel mills and other industries. Today, many Welsh urban rivers still suffer from litter, drainage misconnections and misbehaving sewage treatment works, but if you look carefully, you’ll find wild fish among the remaining shopping trolleys: trout (some of them very big indeed), grayling, barbel and even salmon… Some writing projects can be a slow […]
A few days ago I heard from my publishers Merlin Unwin Books that they’ve finally sold out of all the printed copies of my first book, Trout in Dirty Places. I’m still working out exactly how I feel about this: on one hand, of course, books are supposed to sell out, but on the other, […]
Way back in 2016-17, I had the immense pleasure of taking part in a project to produce a beautiful coffee table book called The Fly Fisher: The Essence and Essentials of Fly Fishing. By all accounts, it’s been hugely successful – so much so, that its publishers Gestalten have just released an updated second edition. […]
