It’s not all doom and gloom on the Lower Thames. I grew up in south London in the 1960’s and nothing survived in the river in central London apart from rats and eels. If you fell in, local legend had it that you were taken to hospital for a stomach pump.
Fast forward 40 years and I’ve caught dace, roach, bream and carp as far downstream as Batttersea. Wandsworth is good for trotting for dace; there are carp to be caught in Chelsea Creek. Putney and Battersea are also good and I have bream to six pounds on the feeder. None of this would have been possible forty, or even twenty years ago. I hear a lot of talk about the Lower Thames being a shadow of its former self, yet I wonder if this has anything to do with fewer anglers fishing it, and therefore fewer catch reports? When I started out in the 1960’s, car ownership was much lower, many anglers relied on public transport and the Thames was the principal venue for London based anglers. These days the combination of mass car ownership and the growth of commercial fisheries within the M25 mean the Thames is much less popular. Parking is also a hassle if you want to fish the Thames in London and access to the waterside can sometimes be difficult. You have the check the tides, river tactics are a closed book to many anglers these days and its little wonder that the Thames is much less fished than it was.
I’m not saying the EA is perfect, far from it, and I’m angry at its neglect of one of my favourite little rivers, the Darent in north west Kent, now a shadow of its former self. The EA’s record on tackling the water companies over abstraction also leaves much to be desired.