That stretch is controlled by the Dawley angling club and they used to have regular winter opens which were well attended and would produce double figure nets of roach and dace with the odd bonus chub and barbel from anywhere along the length.
In recent years a flock of cormorants which roost upstream near the power station woods has decimated the silver fish stocks and as a consequence match attendances have dropped off. As a result the stagings have been allowed to deteriorate and some of them are looking pretty ropey.
The banks along that stretch are notoriously unstable and made up of alternating layers of coal limestone clay and iron ore, (this is how the place became the birthplace of industry as all those items were used in the smelting of iron) however it is a geological nightmare, the clay acting as a waterproof barrier allowing pressure to build in the permeable layers before it collapses and then becomes a lubricant allowing one layer to slide over another and as the gorge is in geologic terms very young (it was formed by a receding glacier at the end of the last ice age) it has not had time to settle and is still trying to close hence many of the houses suffer cracks and subsidence and half of Jackfield actually fell in the river 60 years ago.
The council are busy spending hundreds of millions of pounds of grant money at the moment drilling hundreds of 1 meter diameter holes 30 meters deep and filling them with reinforced concrete to try and stabilise the valley floor and while it might work for a while in the long term geology and gravity will win out and the george will continue to try and close.
With the exception of the iron bridge all the other bridges in the george are only anchored at one end, the other end mounted on a roller to allow movement, if you look closely at the iron bridge you can see that much of the original cast iron structure is cracked and held together with a network of later steel reinforcements. The original bridge was designed much like a wooden bridge and held together with carpentry joints cast into the sections, I had very few rivets or bolts in it but if you look today it is all bolted together and anywhere you see bolts you are looking at damage.
Further upstream towards Buildwas you can see evidence in the fields of a landslip which occurred 300 years ago when 200 acres of hillside moved several hundred yards and completely blocked the river causing a huge lake to fill the valley upstream and lowering level so much downstream that the boats moored up at Bridgnorth waiting for the winter floods so they could continue upstream were completely grounded and when the river inevitably broke through 2 days later the ensuing tidal wave and floods swamped many of them and left them sunk on the bottom.
With all that in mind a few wooden stagings have got no chance.
