The Gresham Club, of which I was once a member for several years, is located on the upper Loddon and is pretty well exclusively trout water fished by a comparatively few, now high-paying people. However, if the proposed housing development were to go ahead, the entire river would be affected. I can remember how, in the early to mid 1980s when I was fishing the Gresham waters, the Club's then Chairman, Bertram Hoare, a wonderful man (and his little committee) fought a ceaseless battle against a sewage works whose outflow (coming out of new Basingstoke) repeatedly polluted the upper section of the Club's waters on the Loddon and killed all its trout. It was interesting to note (I still have some very nice colour slides of the river back then) how the river above the sewage outflow was a different river entirely - fast, bright gravelled, well weeded, full of wild brown trout. Below the outflow, it was a far more sluggish, silted and murky affair. I also well remember Bertram, a very good friend of mine (we first bumped into each other in unlikely Nepal in 1980 and immediately hit it off despite a near-55-year age-difference), saying to me many times something to the effect that "This can't last, Paul. My family [the Hoare's banking family] lost one of our Estates to the Basingstoke development, and they'll come for our river next..."
Bertram was right.
