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 media, including the Independent, Radio New Zealand, and even BBC Radio 4’s Today programme with Evan Davis.

Since then, of course, a lot has changed. Quite apart from obvious things like Brexit and a global pandemic (meaning there’s not much prospect of a Trout in Dirty Europe-style follow up for now) I’ve moved from London to Somerset, retired from chairing the South East Rivers Trust (itself celebrating 20 years since we founded it) and started working 3 days a week for the Wild Trout Trust.

Together with editing the Flyfishers’ Journal, and developing ideas for at least 2 new books, this is all keeping me busy enough that I’ve not spent much time on freelance copywriting recently… or even writing much on this website.

Out in the wider fly-fishing blogosphere, it’s noticeable how some of the best of the early-era fly-fishing bloggers (remember Matt ‘North Country Angler’ Eastham and Tom ‘Trout Underground’ Chandler?) have moved their photographic and literary work away from standalone blogsites like this one, and gone all-in to the supermassive shared space of Instagram.

I’ve been over there for a while too. It’s fun, but I’m also pretty sure that TheoPike.com and Urbantrout.net will only continue to grow as my online homes-from-home.

Still, 10 years feels like a good excuse for an occasional remix of some of my favourite TiDP photos on the ‘gram – including some that never quite reached the printed page – and maybe a few updates on the same Dirty Places for good measure. If you’ve been fishing any of them more recently than I have (quite likely in many cases at the moment) I’d love to hear how you’ve been getting on with them, too.

Stay tuned, and find me here on Instagram in the meantime…

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, it’s sad that there won’t be many totally box-fresh copies out there for would-be urban flyfishers to find on shelves in fishing shops and book stores (though there may still be a few left to snap up at Coch-y-Bonddhu Books and other online sellers!)

Still, the second-hand market will be booming. And of course the e-book version should be available pretty much for ever…

Better make some more progress on the next one, I guess?

(Photo: Kavita Kapoor)

… means Trout in Dirty Places in Italian, and this week I’ve been surprised and thrilled to find out that I’ve featured in this article about urban street fishing as an antidote to lockdown and C-19, in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

For urban and rural dwellers alike, being able to #FishWhereYouLive, or anywhere close to home, is a blessing that’s not lost on those who are lucky enough to experience it – and in fact I’ve recently been writing something on this subject for publication in Fly Culture in a few weeks’ time.

Stay safe, y’all, and watch this space…

(Images: Corriere della Sera)

Nearly a week after we broke the news on social media, I’m still finding it hard to express how incredibly excited I am to be joining the Wild Trout Trust as their new Trout in the Town officer for the south of England and Wales.

Of course, everything has moved on a long way since I was part of that small group of anglers who started pulling shopping trolleys out of the Wandle in south London. The little Wandle Trust has grown up into the big South East Rivers Trust – and in fact the whole idea has spread so that the UK is now completely covered by Rivers Trusts and catchment partnerships looking after rivers from source to sea.

But underneath all of this, I still believe there’s lots of room for local people to start taking personal pride and responsibility for the little urban rivers on their own doorsteps. Most towns were built where they are because of their streams and rivers, and everybody feels an instinctive connection with running water. Healthy, freely-flowing rivers bring a deep, subconscious level of meaning to the places where we live, and I speak from (nearly – how did that happen?) decades of experience when I rip off Kenneth Grahame to say that “there is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in the river at the end of your road”.

So, from 3 April, for 2 days a week, I’ll be teaming up with my old friend Paul Gaskell (hero of Trout in Dirty Places long before I dreamed I’d ever find myself working alongside him) to help spread the word of Trout in the Town.

Get in touch if you’d like to talk about mending your own urban river. It might change your life. It certainly seems to have changed mine!

When you’ve already been sniffing out the secrets (hmm…) of urban rivers for more years than you might care to count, it’s easy to forget that not everyone else has been on this journey of discovery for quite that long.

So here’s a little guest blog post I wrote recently for my good pal Dominic Garnett, fellow copywriter, photographer and curator of the famous Turrall Flies website, offering some starting points for others who might like to take the plunge into Dirty Places this fishing season…

(Photo: Dominic Garnett)

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.

It’s not every day you get interviewed on your home water for an international fishing ezine. So when Germany’s SCALE Magazine offered to send writer-translator Tankred Rinder (also editor of Forelle und Aesche) and photographer Veit Dresmann to south London as part of their round-the-UK road trip in September…

… I jumped at the chance to catch up with Tankred again and tell him more about London trout and the Wandle restoration project in general.

Click here to read our interview in English or German (pages 152 to 165, complete with work-in-progress shots of the Carshalton stretch of the upper Wandle) in the December 2014 issue.

However many urban river restoration projects you get to know (and I got very familiar with a large number of them in the course of researching and writing Trout in Dirty Places), there’s something about meeting new people on the banks of their once-dirty-and-forgotten river that never grows old. 

So it was a particular pleasure to meet Gary, Steve, Matt and other members of the CATCH committee for our inevitable wet-weather walk, and see what they’ve achieved right there on the bankside…

The latest instalment of my Urbantrout Diaries series has just been published on Flyfishing.co.uk, introducing one of the newest Trout in the Town projects (this time in the little Somerset town of Wincanton… still slightly damp after this winter of rain and floods).

Please click through to read the full feature, and check out the CATCH website to find out more!

(Photo: Steve Lee, CATCH)

In September I took a trip down to Dover and discovered another little urban chalkstream that’s spookily similar to the Wandle:

Long before recorded history, the Dour was responsible for creating one of Britain’s earliest natural harbours, wearing a deep notch into the chalk cliffs and providing Neolithic boatmen with a safe landing-place in a strange new land. Since then, this little four-mile river been exploited for the usual rich mix of industrial processes, including tanneries, corn, paper and sawmills, and iron foundries for the military garrison that fortified Dover against continental incursions for most of a millennium. And on our own first sight of the river, a couple of weeks ago, the whole of our South East Rivers Trust team found it hard to suppress a sense of déjà vu…

Just like our home water on the Wandle, the Dour’s spring-fed sources have been landscaped as water-features in manicured public gardens, tidily edged with stonework and toe-boards that now seem ripe for ripping out and softening with native plants. Sometimes, from bridges across concrete channels and wide mill-ponds, you catch glimpses of astonishingly large trout, the kind of trout you’d be happy to see in any chalkstream: leviathans that hang around just long enough to be photographed under stern No Fishing signs before fading into silty weedbeds or ivy-tangled undercuts. 

But that’s where some of the similarities between these urban chalkstreams end – because unlike the easily-accessible Wandle, the Dour becomes progressively tougher to get at, the further it plunges down its post-industrial valley…

Please click through to read the full latest episode of my Urbantrout Diaries, which has now been published on Flyfishing.co.uk …

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)