Sheffield Has a Formal Strategy for its Waterways; Incorporating its Urban and Rural Catchment areas

Some readers may have already seen the various pieces that I've contributed on managing surface water in urban and rural catchments (e.g. videos embedded at the bottom of this post) alongside the organisational role to Sheffield's first One Big River event. This was a week of activities focused on the rivers of the Steel City and was timed to coincide with both the River Restoration Centre's Annual Conference (held for the first time at Sheffield Hallam University: http://www.therrc.co.uk/rrc_conferences.php) as well as the formal signing (and Cabinet adoption) of the Waterways Strategy.

The various community and volunteer events that formed the week-long programme (https://sites.google.com/site/sheffieldonebigriver/main-events-program included a family-day of riverside events run by the Sheffield branch of the Trout in the Town project (SPRITE) and the Wild Trout Trust. Everyone involved really enjoyed talking to local residents and visitors and showing them the life that abounds in the river via both bug sampling displays and also a demonstration of the "Mayfly in the Classroom" apparatus. This also provided an excellent opportunity to hand out the materials containing contact details and descriptions of SPRITE's monthly activities to people who have been living close to the patch of river corridor that the group looks after - but who had not yet heard of all the good things that are done by these dedicated volunteers.

Unfortunately, the downpours in the run up to the SPRITE/WTT event meant that the planned water crowfoot planting was not safe to carry out - so this will be rescheduled for more appropriate conditions. However, there was ample opportunity to introduce some newcomers to the activity of fly fishing (of both British and Japanese varieties!) in the park where our Gazebo of displays and information was installed for the day.

I hope that we can run a similar event next year and, in the meantime, please check out the collated information on this inaugural event on all the web pages here: https://sites.google.com/site/sheffieldonebigriver/home

Also, please have a look at the important and surprising information about managing surface water for the benefit of society and wildlife:

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First Survey Record of Wild Trout Returning to Lyme Brook Habitat Works Site!

You may have seen the first three phases of works on the middle reaches of the Lyme Brook (shown in previous blogs Here and Here) from project works that began in 2015...

Well although the first surveys after that work found some nice coarse fish populations - there was no cold hard evidence that any trout had found the newly-improved habitat...Until now!
I received a phone call today from Matt Lawrence who is the EA's Catchment Host for the Trent Valley Catchment Partnership (with key partners Groundwork West Midlands and the Wild Trout Trust who conceived and delivered the habitat works). Matt told me that he'd had some exciting preliminary reports from a EA Midlands fisheries surveys team. Their survey on 7th September had caught several wild trout as part of their sample on the habitat works site.
These are the first modern records of trout in the brook and is also the exciting news that we have been waiting for on these first phases of work to create spawning, juvenile an…

Catching and Releasing the first Fly-Caught wild trout from a stream that was dug out of a city-centre pipe was probably the highlight of 2016 for me!

Buried in a brick tunnel under England's industrial developments of the 1800s, a section of the Porter Brook in Sheffield was brought back to the surface by a bold project co-ordinated by Sheffield City Council and involving the Wild Trout Trust, The Environment Agency and many more partners.

You can now witness the actual process of freeing the Brook from its pipe - and the creation of functioning trout-stream habitat in this short video.

Yet, the above video does not show the completed park that was a huge part of the entire project - and it does not show the planted vegetation beginning to develop in the summer of 2016. And, it does not show any fly fishing or video of a trout capture...

But the film, below, that was made by the excellent Huckleberry Films as part of the Canal & Rivers Trust "Living Waterways" awar…

A previously buried section of stream produces the first fly caught trout in >160 years

As near as I can work out from the archaeology report, this section of river - recently brought back to the surface in dramatic fashion by Sheffield City Council, the EA and the WTT partnership - was buried in a low brick tunnel somewhere around 1853 to 1868. The northern half of the site was certainly buried underground BEFORE the time the 1853 map was produced....and the rest of the brick tunnel was placed over the top of the stream before the map of 1868...

Of course, it is not easy to tell what the water quality was like in that section even BEFORE the stream was buried...and whether there were trout surviving in the stream when it was sealed underground...

What is damned sure is that you couldn't wave a fly fishing rod around in that underground tunnel once they'd built it!

This was still the case until the completion of the massive project to remove the brickwork and create an attractive "pocket park" in the city centre. You might have seen from This Previous …

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