Fly-fishing the urban wilderness
For adventurous fly-fishers at the start of the twenty-first century, it’s easy to get the impression that there are no new waters left to discover.
Less than eighty years after Negley Farson fished his way across Chilean Patagonia with companions who thought the rivers were getting too crowded if another angler appeared within ten miles, Planet Earth already feels like a much smaller place. Cheap flights and plentiful leisure time have brought the world’s furthest-flung waters within easy reach, and the new media revolution makes even the most exotic destinations feel familiar and a little too well trodden.
Steelhead in British Columbia?Seen it on DVD. Mahseer in the Himalayas?All over the internet. Taimen in Mongolia?Wasn’t somebody video-blogging that last week?
But as you’re about to discover, fly-fishing’s most fulfilling new frontier may be no further than the urban river at the end of your street. And there’s nothing more inspiring and counterintuitive than casting a fly for iconic clean-water species like trout and grayling in the post-industrial surroundings of some of our most damaged riverscapes.
The world’s first industrial revolution – and Britain’s biggest conurbations – were powered by water flowing swiftly over Jurassic and Carboniferous geology, rich with deposits of coal, iron ore and limestone. Rivers naturally aggregate their catchments’ features, so these steeply-falling streams paid the price for landscape-scale industrialisation: impounded and dewatered for power and industrial processes, then converted into open drains to carry away every possible form of human and manufacturing effluent. Many rivers literally died at this point: scoured by floods of toxic waste, superheated by power stations and steel mills, hemmed in with vertical walls, even culverted completely when they overflowed with filth and became too much of a risk to human health.
Almost without exception, industrial rivers started out as their towns’ defining features, but the economics of exploitation turned them into dangerously uncontrollable forces of nature that had to be subdued at almost any cost. Modern river restorationists recognise three distinct stages in our historic attitudes to urban waterways. From around 1850 to 1950, rivers were used for sanitation, waste disposal, and sometimes transport. Between 1950 and the 1990s, sewage treatment and pollution control improved dramatically thanks to the privatisation of the water companies, the creation of the National Rivers Authority, and finally the abrupt decline of Britain’s heavy industries: a tragedy for many communities, but an unexpected blessing for the rivers.
Finally, in the early 1990s, a few radical thinkers returned to the realisation that waterways weren’t just drains and sources of disease, but positive assets that could once again improve our lives and lift our spirits: the same pioneering philosophy that drives so many of the people and organisations you’ll meet in these pages. (Today the upward trajectory of river restoration across Europe has been made legally binding by the EU’s Water Framework Directive, complete with targets for the UK’s Environment Agency to deliver in the form of river basin management plans by deadlines in 2015, 2021 and beyond. Classed as ‘heavily modified water bodies’, many of our urban rivers will probably be restricted to targets of ‘good ecological potential’ rather than the optimum ‘good ecological status’… but it’s a start).
All this time, relict populat
