Graffiti, discarded beer cans, shouts from drunk punters spilling out of nearby bars … Few would describe Camden Lock as an angler’s paradise. But it’s on this stretch of London canal, far from the burbling chalk streams and tranquil ponds of the British countryside, where 22-year-old Tom Lloyd likes to fish. He’s been angling all over central London since he was a teenager. He first picked up a rod on a trip with a friend to Waltham Abbey in Essex, but quickly discovered he could fish far closer to home: “You can be in the middle of this urban setting with drunk people and beer bottles, but you’re just there catching fish with your headphones on,” he says.
Street fishing, also referred to as urban fishing, lure fishing or predator fishing, is a growing sport attracting a new, younger breed of angler. It is at its biggest in mainland Europe, especially Paris where an underground culture of millennial and gen Z anglers from all backgrounds is taking over the banks of the Seine. (When one of the movement’s pioneers, Fred Miessner, died suddenly last year in a car crash, hundreds of French youth turned out for a fishing vigil.)
