It had character. Proper character. Sadly, character these days apparently means selling artisan chutney at the price of a small mortgage payment, so the whole place after the owners sold the land has transformed into a fashionable farm shop with reclaimed wood, hanging baskets and customers who discuss olives as if they’re trading fine wines.
I wandered round it carefully, frightened to touch anything in case it added twelve quid to the bill.
One sausage roll looked like it ought to come with finance options. The café was packed with people paying the thick end of a tenner for a pork bap, which felt wrong on both a financial and spiritual level.
I gave that a miss entirely and headed for safer ground at the butcher’s counter and cheese section, where sanity still just about survives.
To be fair, the Cumberland and Welsh Dragon sausages were absolute belters. They went down on the barbecue with the sort of sizzling confidence usually reserved for bank managers retiring early. Even the neighbours started sniffing the air hopefully. By the time they were done there was barely enough left for a photograph, never mind leftovers.
After that I sat sorting the tackle out for a dabble in the morning, pleasantly full and smelling faintly of smoke and sausage grease. Leads untangled, hooks checked, rigs inspected with all the seriousness of a bomb disposal unit. There’s something reassuring about preparing fishing gear at the end of the evening while the rest of the world worries about important things. Somewhere out there the fish were probably making similar preparations to avoid me.
Now there are two types of canal roach in this world: the honest countryside roach, lean as a tax inspector and twice as nervous… and the town roach, which resembles a silver dinner plate with fins and the confidence of a pigeon outside Greggs. You can keep your misty rural cuttings and your kingfisher postcards. Come November, the real canal aristocracy has already abandoned the hedgerows and relocated itself beneath the shopping precinct, directly opposite a vape shop and a kebab establishment called “Marmaris Mega Kebab & Continental Flooring.”
The average towpath rambler imagines fish crave tranquillity. Absolute nonsense. Roach adore civilisation. If they had hands, they’d queue for discounted pastries and complain about parking permits. Take water temperature for starters. In the countryside, winter arrives like an unpaid gas bill. The canal turns icy, bleak and about as welcoming as a magistrate. Out in the sticks, a roach has to flap about all day merely to remain alive.
Meanwhile, in town centres, the water enjoys the comforting warmth generated by buses, chip-fat extraction fans, concrete retaining walls, and eighteen thousand people panic-walking to Primark. The canal acquires the pleasant temperature of weak tea. Naturally the roach pile in by the thousand like shoppers at a Boxing Day sofa sale. Then there’s the food situation. Rural roach survive on the occasional bloodworm and whatever drifts past looking unfortunate. Urban roach, however, dine like minor royalty.
A single Saturday afternoon beside a town canal produces:
Half a baguette.
Three chips.
Two unidentified orange items.
One complete sausage roll.
And, mysteriously, a floating kiwi fruit.
You could trot maggots through there if you wished, but the fish are probably discussing focaccia.
Predators also present fewer concerns in town. A cormorant likes open water and solitude. It does not enjoy dodging mobility scooters beneath railway bridges while being shouted at by a man carrying lager before midday. Consequently, the roach feel perfectly secure. They wedge themselves beneath lock gates, under shopping trolleys, alongside abandoned bicycles and occasionally inside traffic cones. If architecture could produce scales, every municipal drainage pipe in Britain would qualify as a fish refuge.
The great joy for the angler is that winter shoals in urban canals become outrageously concentrated. You spend six fruitless hours on a picturesque rural stretch catching one perch the size of a cough sweet… then arrive in town and accidentally hook fifteen roach before you’ve unfolded your chair properly.
Of course, town-centre fishing possesses its own atmosphere.
There is always a elderly gentleman with nothing to do asking whether you’ve caught any.
There is always a terrier attempting suicide via keepnet.
And there is invariably a teenage scrote on an electric scooter who appears silently behind you like an ambush predator from the future.
Still, the fish remain gloriously unconcerned. The urban canal roach has evolved beyond stress. Sirens, buses, nightclub basslines, heated arguments over chicken shops none of it troubles them.
These fish have seen things.
So next time somebody tells you the “proper” canal experience lies among silent fields and romantic reed beds, smile politely and continue assembling your tackle beneath the ring road flyover. Because somewhere under that bridge, amid the flickering reflections of takeaway signs and the gentle aroma of battered cod, lives a shoal of roach so fat and content they probably pay council tax.
I’d dropped into the crane swim armed with optimism, a loaf of medium sliced, and approximately three teaspoons of actual confidence.
Bread was the plan this morning. Sensible, reliable, traditional. Maggots sat in reserve like emergency rations in a war film, waiting for the inevitable collapse of morale.
A decent roach would’ve done me nicely. Nothing heroic. I wasn’t after one of those mythical canal perch that only exist in blurry photographs held by blokes named Kev who smell faintly of woodbines and resentment.
Just a tidy red-finned roach to remind me I still vaguely knew what I was doing. Ever since that tench turned up last week completely uninvited, the canals have felt all wrong. It’s like the fishing equivalent of accidentally seeing your dentist in Tesco buying Wham Sourz's and Haribo Sparks. The whole balance of the universe goes a bit peculiar.
Truth be told, the canals aren’t doing it for me lately. No rhythm whatsoever. One session you can’t stop catching tiny gudgeon with ambition far beyond their station, then the next it’s deader than a vegan barbecue at a cattle market. Every peg looks perfect until you sit on it for three hours and begin questioning all your life choices. I spent twenty minutes staring at a single bubble trail convincing myself it was feeding fish when in reality it was probably a submerged bicycle quietly rusting to death.
Still, there’s always hope on an early Sunday morning. That magical window before the reprobates arrive. Before somebody starts power-washing a transit van nearby or a cyclist in fluorescent lycra screams “MORNING” directly into your soul at forty miles an hour. Canal dawn has a fragile beauty to it. Moorhens pottering about. Mist lifting off the water. The faint aroma of damp earth mixed with lager and urban regret.
Down on the old cut at Bankside, yours truly arrived at what can only be described as “an hour fit for sensible folk and milkmen.” The canal looked proper fishy too — you know the sort of look, a few dimples on the surface, a suspicious swirl under the far bank and just enough confidence to make a man ignore the fact he’d forgotten his flask.
Naturally I went into full panic mode and got set-up quick sharpish like a contestant on a timed game show. Out went a bit of mashed bread mixed with groundbait, bread on the hook, float cocked perfectly and suddenly I was fishing. Proper fishing too, not just staring moodily at water pretending to understand nature.
Five minutes later a decent fish launched itself clear of the canal right beside the float like a hairy-arsed salmon auditioning for Countryfile. “Here we go,” I muttered confidently, already mentally photographing myself with a four-pound redfin and composing exaggerated Facebook captions. Naturally the float then sat there like a pensioner at a bus stop. Not a tremble. Not a dip. Absolute naff all. Thirty minutes later I finally had a bite and struck into something solid, only for it to come off after a few seconds. Buggeration of the highest order. The sort of moment where you stare accusingly at the hook as if it personally betrayed you.
Still, there were fish in the swim and that alone was enough to keep hope alive. Two more missed bites followed, each one delivered with all the precision timing of me trying to clap along at a concert after four pints. Then at last — wallop. I struck into a proper fish and the thing tore around the swim like it owed money to dangerous people. At first I thought I’d connected with some colossal canal roach, the sort old blokes lie about in tackle shops, but when it finally surfaced looking thoroughly offended with life it turned out to be a roach-bream hybrid. A lovely fish too, going 2lb 8oz on the scales. Not exactly British record territory, but after recent blanks it may as well have been a marlin from the Amazon.
The funny thing with hybrids is they fight with all the confusion of a fish that doesn’t entirely know what it wants to be. This one lunged about magnificently while I conducted my usual bankside ballet of stumbling backwards, muttering nonsense and praying the hook hold would stay put. Mercifully it did. Another three hybrids followed over the session, one even nudging 2lb 9oz and scrapping like an angry Staffie on espresso, and the next biggest 2lb 8oz which I thought was the same fish at first. Ridiculous fun on light gear and exactly the sort of fishing that keeps you coming back despite all evidence suggesting you should perhaps pursue quieter hobbies like gardening or tax accounting.
At one stage I swapped to maggots hoping for a bonus fish, but all I got was a succession of perch that looked like they’d been assembled from leftover parts. Nice enough little fish, but hardly the stamp of stripey warrior that gets the pulse racing. Still, bites are bites and canal anglers are not proud people. We celebrate almost everything short of catching old shopping trolleys, though admittedly even that sometimes earns a photograph if it’s particularly impressive.
The biggest battle of the morning, however, wasn’t with the fish. Oh no. It was with the tow, the wind and the endless parade of floating canal crud that insisted on dragging the float about like a drunken Labrador on a lead. Presenting bait cleanly became less an act of angling and more a test of emotional resilience with enough debris to start a compost heap. Bits of weed, leaves, mysterious slime and what may once have been somebody’s Greggs wrapper all joined forces against me.
Then, just as things were ticking along nicely, a boat came through at 9:20am with all the subtlety of the German navy entering Warsaw. The swim churned up, the tow increased and the fish disappeared quicker than free bacon sandwiches at a match lake open. Still, all in all it had been a cracking little session. A few proper fish, plenty of action, no blank and best of all — the bailiff never appeared to relieve me of my hard-earned pounds. That alone counts as a result these days.
I’ll definitely be back though. There’s something brewing down there amongst the bread mash, hybrids and canal chaos. Either that or I’m slowly losing my mind beside urban waterways, which admittedly is also very possible.
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