Writer, fly-fisher, river restorationist
This time last year when I wrote in my introduction to Trout in Dirty Places … Despite their recovery and fragile resilence, we shouldn’t be in any doubt that urban trout and grayling still inhabit rivers on a knife edge. Chances are, between the time I finish writing this book and you start reading it, […]
When it comes to pictures expressing a thousand words… even to a compulsive writer, this is one of those. Stalking the gravel flats, swampy oxbows, truncated spurs and meandering terraces of a river I’ve known since my teens but hardly started to understand until now… … thanks to local expert Owain, I felt as if […]
While this summer’s rogue jetstream took yet another swing at southern and central England, rolling an endless procession of thunderheads up the M3 corridor and finally landing a knockout blow on 2012’s Game Fair… … Rich and I gambled a late afternoon off gainful employment and drove south west from the Wandle to Winchester. Under […]
A day on an urban river can start just like any other day on the water, but that’s sometimes where the similarity ends. Because whereas your average rural fishing idyll usually means heading out of town to places where few other people ever go, urban angling often takes you in the opposite direction: right back […]
With the razzmatazz of the book launch behind us, the Trout in Dirty Places show has been on the road out of London… … first for a book-signing event and generally big night out at the Hillsborough Hotel microbrewery in Sheffield, complete with pints of deliciously hoppy Wobbly Wader beer (with 10p per pint generously […]
At last summer’s Game Fair, Fly Fishing & Fly Tying editor Mark Bowler asked me if I’d like to put together a feature nominating my favourite urban rivers, to coincide with the publication of Trout in Dirty Places. So here’s my top 10*… available by subscription or from all good news stands, in the current […]
(Photo: Roy Eaton) Amid the storm of positive publicity surrounding the launch of Trout in Dirty Places, a moment of sadness: news of the passing of Sidney Vines. As a confidant of both Frank Sawyer and Oliver Kite, Sidney was a link to a genuinely vanished world, which he recorded authoritatively in Keeper of the […]
One week on from the official launch of Trout in Dirty Places at Grangers in South Kensington, and the slightly scary sense that I haven’t so much dropped a pebble into the margins of a quiet pool as heaved a bloody great boulder into a cast-iron bathtub… … is slowly starting to subside. Still, it’s […]
Accompanied by doom-laden headlines about hosepipe bans, double-dip recession, petrol shortages, and killer shrimp in the Norfolk Broads, next Tuesday’s official publication date for Trout in Dirty Places is creeping ever closer. And like that old (but very apt) analogy of a dropped pebble’s ripples widening over a pool, the story still seems to be […]
Thanks to my highly-efficient publishers and a very fast slow boat from China, pre-publication copies of Trout in Dirty Places are now available to buy online from Merlin Unwin Books. (Complete with more than 200 colour photos and a front cover shot from the talented Dominic Garnett). Go get ’em… or contact me direct if […]
