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 burn between concept and publication, and that’s OK.

I think it must have been in autumn 2019 that Ceri Thomas asked me if I’d share some of my favourite Welsh fishing spots in a feature for the new Fishing in Wales website. Of course, I said, and turned it round in time for publication sometime in spring 2020, but we all know what happened this time last year…

Thanks to the most excellent C-19 vaccination programme, though, 2021 is looking a lot more promising for fishing travel. And urban fisheries hold great potential if you’re hunting for beautiful big wild trout that may hardly have seen a fly in the last year and a half.

So, click here to find my favourite 5 Welsh urban rivers. Then get your vaccine shots as soon as you can, and maybe I’ll see you out there on the banks.

(Spoiler: I’m all about the Usk, Taff, Rhymney, Ogmore and Afon Lwyd. But you’ll still need to check that article to find out exactly why!)

After taking a break for a few issues, I’m delighted to say that I’ve just had another article published in Fallon’s Angler…

… this time revisiting (from a very different angle) a few days I spent exploring the chalkstreams of northern France last summer with Jeremy Lucas and a couple of pals from the South East Rivers Trust:

The river curves away from us in the thickets, and we struggle down to a boggy fringe of reeds. The far bank is park-like and closely mown, and while there’s something I don’t quite fancy about the bungalow in the distance, or the concentration-camp spotlights on the corners of two square ponds surrounded by chain link fences, the whole stretch is clearly marked on the map as part of the local fishing association’s beat. The bed of the river looks silty, glinting with shoals of cans and bottles that must have drifted down from Ligny. Keith, all six feet seven of him, ploughs confidently across and gives me a hand out of the water. We creep along the bank…

Editor Garrett Fallon usually asks for something in the region of 2,000 words, so I’m hugely grateful to him for letting me shoot well over that word limit in pursuit of my subject (which quite apart from spookily-familiar chalkstreams also includes dogs, war, big grayling, and some lesser-known but still scalp-tingling poetry from Robert Service).

For all the obvious benefits of social media and microblogging, most publishing formats aren’t getting any longer, and having the freedom to develop a full, polished story arc is a very real luxury for any writer. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way: in fact I’m almost certain Dom Garnett, Bruno Vincent, Chris Yates, Kevin Parr, Dexter Petley and several other contributors to this issue feel exactly the same…

Issue 7 of Fallon’s Angler is now available from the magazine’s website and a few selected outlets – if you’d like to read more, please do click here to get your copy today!

Quite apart from the constant hum of creativity that means we’re now getting to play with some of the finest, most sophisticated tackle ever deployed in search of elusive fish, I think it’s fair to say that two developments – no, movements – within the last 20 years have revolutionised the lives of most of Britain’s anglers.

One of these (as you might expect me to mention) has been the transformation of so many formerly-polluted city rivers into healthy, productive fisheries – often enough, a considerable triumph of local hope over experience.

The other has been the creation of angling passport schemes, run by rivers trusts like Westcountry Rivers Trust and the Wye & Usk Foundation. These don’t just incentivise landowners to take better care of their rivers – they also make it much easier for all of us to get onto the bankside without having to study OS maps, pacify farm dogs, and go knocking on lots of doors at inconvenient times of the day and night.

Urban and rural, these two movements mean that many of us can now go fishing remarkably close to our own front doors, turning our sport into an ordinary, pleasurable part of everyday life instead of an occasional, expensive badge of luxury.

So when my good pal Seth Johnson-Marshall, project manager at the Wye & Usk Foundation, called to ask if I’d care to contribute a feature about fishing the miraculously-restored upper Taff and Taf Fechan for the 2016 edition of their legendary Fishing Passport…

… two of my favourite good causes came swimming into alignment, and how could I possibly refuse?

Today, the Taf Fechan is back on sparkling form, and so is the main river (in the run-up to the Taff’s first international fishing tournaments, the amount of rubbish removed by volunteers from the Merthyr Tydfil Angling Association was amazing, including a full set of traffic lights complete with the cable connecting them!) 

Thanks to funding from Defra related to the European Water Framework Directive, the South East Wales Rivers Trust is steadily dealing with fish passage problems throughout the whole Taff catchment: grayling still can’t quite get over the weirs at Quakers Yard, but salmon have recently been seen spawning in the upper Taf Fawr for the first time in 200 years. 

Now, where the waters of the Taff once ran Bible black with coal dust from the collieries, you can stalk big wild trout that are also known to move up and down the full length of the river on their own mysterious travels. And whether you prefer matching the hatch with surprisingly tiny dry flies, or carefully dissecting current seams with weighted nymphs and indicator rigs, there’s room here for every technique. Yes, the Taff’s recovery is a true miracle of modern river mending, and I know where I’d like to spend much more of my own fishing time this season…

If that’s inspired you to try fishing the Taff or Taf Fechan this season (both featured in chapter 37 of Trout in Dirty Places) you can now buy day tickets direct through the Wye & Usk Foundation’s website.

And of course you can also ask Seth and his colleagues to send you a printed copy of the 2016 Fishing Passport… or click here to read the whole of my feature on the MTAA website.

Regular readers of this blog will know how much I enjoy contributing occasional articles to Eat, Sleep, Fish, the monthly not-for-profit ezine published by my good pal Pete Tyjas from his base at the Devon School of Flyfishing.

For most of the 2015 season I’ve been fishing a Vision Kalu reel, as part of a range of rigs that’s also included the Sunray lines which I wrote about a few weeks ago.

And frankly I’ve been loving the subtle heat it’s helped me bring to landing a whole shoal of different fish – from swaggering south London trout to personal-best French grayling – all culminating in that unsolicited 7lb Scottish salmon on (wince…) 3lb tippet.

So, when I thought I could see space on the interwebs for an in-depth review of the Kalu’s features and benefits…

… the 4th birthday issue of Eat, Sleep, Fish looked like just the place:

Weighing in at 121g, the 3/4 size is heavy enough to balance the latest generation of long, light dry fly and nymphing rods, as well as shorter rigs. I’ve enjoyed hanging the Kalu off the Greys Streamflex XF2 10 foot 2 weight, the Sage ESN 10 foot 2 weight and the Marryat Tactical 10 foot 3 weight this season, and it’s proved a great match for all of them… 

For the full low-down, please click on over to issue 48 of Eat, Sleep, Fish to read my full review of the Vision Kalu.

(And then, while you’re still in the mood, check out my review of Vision’s new Urban boots on Urbantrout.net too!)

The last two years have been one hell of a fly-fishing experiment.

A major highlight of life as a freelance copywriter is getting to hear about new products and services – and, better still, writing about them – long before they reach the general market. In the last few months, for instance, I’ve written copy and created marketing concepts for a major financial services brand, a horticultural charity and a recruitment company. It’s fairly unusual to work with anyone directly involved in the fly-fishing industry, but earlier this year I also got to do some development copywriting for a new fly-line business, and that’s how I came across Tom Bell and his Sunray lines.

Now, I’ve been an ultralight fly-fishing freak from way back. There’s nothing more satisfying than putting the sneak on a big, wild, wary fish, preferably with a dry fly and a rod as long and light as you can get away with, and at this end of the game, it’s those tiniest margins of stealth and lightness that often seem to make the difference.

Ultralight lines and delicate furled leaders were one thing, but when Jeremy Lucas published his excellent book Presentation Fly Fishing last year, it immediately grabbed my fullest attention. Jeremy’s proposition centred on tweaking a basic Euro-nymphing leader into a micro shooting head for fishing dry flies, by adding a short length of thicker, heavier braid to a thin 0.47mm copolymer running line.

I spent the summer of 2014 testing this rig to its limits, discovering that it did indeed deliver supernaturally delicate presentations and astonishing drag-free drifts – to the extent that you could get away with lining spooky fish repeatedly, and still catch them once you landed your fly in the right current lane. The envelope had definite edges in terms of range and accuracy, but if you really bore down, you could usually deal with the first by means of stealthy wading (sometimes on hands and knees, making good use of SWAT-style knee pads), and the second didn’t matter so much when you could make multiple presentations over the same fish. By the end of last season, Jeremy’s presentation leader had helped me land wild trout over 3lbs on dry flies, and I was a happy man.

Come spring 2015, and the brief from Tom to work on his Sunray copy, and I spotted a new, full-geek level of possibility. Sunray lines, I learned, are all about micro-thin diameters: light-absorbing compound coatings bonded to barely-there monofilament cores to make lines that were significantly thinner and sneakier than anything we’d seen before.

Intriguingly, the range included a FIPS-competition-legal 0.55mm Euro-nymphing line. Would this work better than 14 metres of copolymer as the running line behind Jeremy’s ultralight shooting head? It did. Accepting a little more sag off the rod tip, and a little more drag as a result, the infinitesimal extra mass of a real fly-line gave much more accurate dry fly presentations on this hybrid rig.

Of course, as you’d expect, the Sunray World Championship Nymph line also runs exceptionally well in its original spec on the same class of 10ft 2wt rods: practically invisible, super sensitive, and capable of cutting through water with virtually no resistance when a good fish takes your fly. This final benefit hit me rather forcibly when I suddenly landed a personal-best 19” grayling from a torrential stretch of the Aa in France, followed by an unsolicited 7lb salmon on 3lb tippet from the Ken in Galloway. Without such a line as part of a finely balanced system, I’ve no hesitation in saying, neither of those fish would have come anywhere near their brief encounter with my landing net…

In the meantime, another piece of the jigsaw had also slotted into place. Have you read Jeremy Lucas’ book? I asked Tom one day. Highly recommended, and he might like to talk to you about lines too. Within a matter of months, the Sunray Jeremy Lucas Presentation Line took flight – a new taper that delivers on much of the low-impact-stealth-and-dry-fly-delicacy promise of the original micro shooting head idea, while firmly staking all the problems of accuracy and range (though further research with this taper shows that you’ll also start paying with rising levels of sag-and-drag under some circumstances, so this line has definitely developed, or departed from – take your pick! – the pure original concept behind Presentation Fly Fishing). Humans are notoriously wired with short memories and a frantic yen for the Next Big Thing, but the JL line went to Slovenia with me in September, and now I’m kinda wondering how I managed to catch any fish at all before this summer…

Over on his North Country Angler blog, Matt Eastham suggests quite rightly that Sunray’s products are fast gaining a cult following which threatens to expand into widespread acceptance some time very soon, and until then it’s great to be here on the ninja-stealthy-when-everyone-else-is-crashing-around-in-great-big-jackboots ground floor.

In 50 years’ time, it’s perfectly possible that we’ll be feeding hologram flies to trout on the end of weightless fibre-optic or force-field fly-lines. Meanwhile, it seems to me, all the ongoing UK-based R&D behind this new generation of Sunray lines is giving us some of the most intriguing ultralight presentation gear in the game today.

Like I said… it doesn’t happen often, but I’m glad copywriting and fly-fishing sometimes converge.

The past few weeks have been busy with new project development (of which, I hope, more soon!) but I’ve also had the thrill of meeting two great and influential writers on the banks of the Wandle.

First up was Tankred Rinder, Austrian author and editor of the rapidly-growing Forelle und Aesche e-zine. Tankred fished the Wandle semi-regularly with local fly-casting instructor Alex Titov whilst living in the UK a few years ago: now based in Cologne (but travelling widely on fishy business), he’d read Trout in Dirty Places and had been inspired to write a double feature on urban fishing and river restoration for his German audience.

On the afternoon of his latest visit the Wandle was flowing high, cold and wintry… so we spent the afternoon Kaffeeklatsching in the café at Morden Hall Park instead. Tankred’s article on the Wandle has now appeared here, and his feature on urban fly-fishing is here: please do click through to read them in the original German, or let Google Translate give you the gist if your Teutonic turns of phrase, like mine, aren’t quite as fluent as they might once have been.

Secondly – and with a lot less advance planning – came the celebrated environmental writer-campaigner George Monbiot, who dropped in on the Wandle to witness the excitement of this year’s Trout in the Classroom trout fry releases.

Being personally fascinated by the edgeland blurring of boundaries that’s happening on the Wandle and urban rivers across the world, as the philosophy of the Trout in the Town movement takes hold and brings iconic wild trout back to concrete canyons where natural processes have been suspended for hundreds of years, I’m intrigued that George’s next book explores very similar territory.

In the meantime, his deeply thoughtful and moving piece about rewilding urban kids and rivers appeared last week on the Guardian website, complete with name-check for Trout in Dirty Places.  There’s a short extract over on my Urbantrout blog, and the full piece can also be found on George’s own site.

One year on, the confluences continue…

(First photo: Tankred Rinder / Alex Titov)

When the authoritative history of whole-river restoration comes to be written, Derbyshire’s Haddon estate will probably deserve a chapter of its own. The Peak District’s limestone River Wye has been legendary for dry fly only rules since 1865, but modern river management took one of its greatest leaps of faith in 2004, when Haddon’s head keeper Warren Slaney launched the award-winning Going Wild project – stopping stocking for good, and diverting all those fish-breeding funds and energies into river restoration and catchment management instead.

Today, the estate’s rivers have a well-earned reputation for their bucolic English character. By most accounts, fishing the Wye, Lathkill and Bradford for their unique wild rainbow trout at mayfly time is as close as you’ll come to an authentic hallucinatory experience without getting stuck on the hard stuff: a narcotic hit of lush meadows, limestone crags, rushing water and rising fish that’s so intense it’s almost painful.

On the other hand, it’s also an open secret that a long stretch of the Peacock Fly Fishing Club’s water flows through the beating heart of Bakewell, complete with flood walls and concrete weirs, footbridges thronged with tourists, and white vans drawn up on the showground for Sunday morning car boot fairs. No prizes, then, for guessing where three reprobate Wandle Piscators chose to spend the first hour of the Wild Trout Trust’s annual grayling-fishing fundraiser last weekend…

A full six months from their breeding season, the legendary Wye rainbows were fit and eager to feed, rounding voraciously on flies intended for more fastidious grayling. If you hooked up, there wasn’t much you could do except play the game fast and hard: team effort landed a 6-pound street-fighter for Adrian…

… while local tackle shop owner Peter Arfield stopped to chat about Trout in Dirty Places and helped me bank a kebab-fed bruiser of my own:

Still, more than enough grayling came out to play with unaccustomed tungsten nymphs to make our Bakewell expedition worthwhile…

… before the real hordes of walkers started crowding the paths behind us, and we agreed we’d find quieter fishing elsewhere, with a little less likelihood of a lawsuit at the end of the line!

I’m delighted to announce that my latest Trout in Dirty Places flavoured feature has just appeared in this week’s issue of Shooting Times.

The article focuses on urban fly-fishing opportunities for trout and grayling in Britain’s market towns including Fakenham, Leominster and Tiverton, and I’ve also (briefly!) addressed the vital role that’s played by good rural land management practices and catchment-sensitive farming in protecting water and habitat quality across whole river systems:

The Wye and Usk Foundation estimates that more than 700,000 tonnes of valuable soil are washed into the Lugg and other tributaries of the Wye every year, smothering spawning gravels at the same time as denuding the local strawberry, maize and potato fields, while fertiliser run-off contributes to algal blooms that deplete river oxygen levels and even cause fish kills.

… so this isn’t an insignificant environmental or economic issue (hang on, did someone just say ecosystem services or Upstream Thinking?)

I grabbed my Shooting Times at Victoria Station yesterday between Rivers Trust and Wandle Piscators meetings – and you can’t get much more urban than that.

But copies should be available at newsagents in towns of all sizes across the UK for the next few hours at least.  So if you’re interested in exploring a totally different angle on the traditionally rural sport of fly-fishing, pick up yours today!

My publisher Merlin Unwin promised me a few months ago that there’s nothing quite like the moment when the first copy of your first book finally hits your desk.

And guess what?  He was right.

After years of research and exploration, and almost unbelievable generosity and help from more than 200 people (count ’em on the acknowledgements page!) this snapshot of urban fly-fishing, river restoration and the voluntary sector at the start of the 21st century is lining up to land.

As that first copy thumped onto the doormat, and then emerged from its packaging beside the keyboard where every last word had been typed, re-assessed and eventually let loose into the wild… I could hardly believe it myself.

Better still, somewhere on a container ship in the South China Sea, another 2,998 copies are on their way home for full publication in exactly 2 months’ time.  Apparently that’ll be a pretty unforgettable moment too…