Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Out now, in the Spring 2020 issue of Pete Tyjas’s excellent Fly Culture magazine, is an article I’ve written called Limestone Chemistry. As the title suggests, it’s a geological, post-industrial and piscatorial study of my years-long love for a little limestone stream, not too far from where I’m living now. A previous, shorter version of […]
“Hi Theo, any way we can coax you across the Pond to speak to an audience of Maryland Trout Unlimited and our river project partners around Baltimore?” said the email from Tom Gamper in August. “We’ve read Trout in Dirty Places, and appreciated how it laid out the team effort to turn urban streams back […]
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 […]
Autumn can be one of the best times of the fishing year. But it’s all too precious and fleeting, so how can we really make the most of it? Friends who’ve fished with me in recent years will know that when I’m on the water in the shoulder seasons, I’m increasingly likely to reach for […]
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 […]
For the second year running I’ve been greatly privileged to contribute a feature to S&TC’s Gamefisher magazine – this time on the hot topic of rewilding, and how it’s actively taking place in Ennerdale on the western edge of Cumbria: Because water flows downhill, rivers are the sum total of everything that’s happening on the […]
