Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
This is my second year in the hot seat as editor of the Wild Trout Trust’s annual journal Salmo Trutta. And once again it’s been an astonishing privilege to work with so many talented experts to produce 94 pages of trouty, rivery gorgeousness, including… Six pages of rod licence artwork (and the glorious front cover […]
Last autumn the Flyfishers’ Club (where I’m editor of the biannual Flyfishers’ Journal) took an important and very welcome step forward into the 21st century by voting in favour of welcoming women as members for the first time since the Club was formed in 1884, by a solid majority of 75%. Naturally, I wanted to […]
The Wild Trout Trust has enjoyed a close and beneficial relationship with fishing tackle retailers Farlows and Sportfish for years (if you’ve ever used their mail order services, you may have found a WTT flyer or membership form tucked in amongst your shiny new merchandise!) Both of these leading brands have also been hugely supportive […]
‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ is an idea which may never be more relevant than on the English, French and Danish chalk streams. These placid little rivers have undergone radical alterations, even in the past 100 years, yet our human memories are inevitably too short to register such changes clearly. Enter Edwin Alfred Barton, a London doctor […]
Salmo Trutta is the Wild Trout Trust’s prestigious annual journal, now in its 27th issue, and after several years of helping the brilliant Denise Ashton with commissioning, proof reading and other matters, 2024 has been my first year fully ensconced in the editor’s chair. Of course, like most publications of this kind, Salmo Trutta is […]
Apart from his reputation as an outspoken environmentalist and dedicated salmon fisher, King Charles III has also been Patron of the Flyfishers’ Club for many years… … and the latest edition of the Flyfishers’ Journal records the gifts presented by the Club to commemorate his coronation in May 2023. These included boxes of specially-tied salmon […]
I knew all those years of working in charity marketing agencies would come in handy some day… This autumn – apart from editing the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal and hitting a really important new publisher’s deadline of my own (announcement coming soon!) – I’ve also been pulling together the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn […]
Earlier this year, the Flyfishers’ Club achieved an amazing coup by acquiring a cased set of six copies of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler – representing all the versions of the book which were published in IW’s own lifetime. To celebrate this momentous addition to the Club’s Library, we somehow persuaded the talented fly-fishing photographer […]
One of the nearly-unavoidable hazards of traditional print production seems to be the way that important details can go out of date almost as soon as the book is published (and this situation has only deteriorated as we’ve started including more and more references to fundamentally ephemeral digital media!) In the case of my own […]
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 […]
