SerpApi.Org
Over the course of his life, Andrej Urosevic estimates that he has consumed roughly 150 species of fish. The 45-year-old Londoner has eaten zander and catfish from the river Rhine, pike from the Loire and, recently, a striped bass that he gutted, descaled and filleted in the bathtub of an airport Hilton in Canada. Urosevic, a former commercial-property investment banker and restaurant owner, is on a personal mission to eat (and ideally catch) as many species of fish as he possibly can.
But there is one river from which he would not eat the merest minnow. Cruelly, for the fly-fishing obsessive, it is also the river that flows just a few streets away from his Pall Mall flat. “When you don’t know all the data, you have to go with your gut,” Urosevic explains as we squelch over the muddy shingle of the Thames foreshore, fishing rods in hand. “Looking at the river and all the sewage being pumped into the catchment area, I would not currently eat a river Thames fish.”
Across the Western world, urban rivers are recovering from centuries of ecological decline. In April, the New York State Department of Health declared that for the first time in 50 years, some species of fish caught in the Lower Hudson river are now safe to eat (specifically, up to four portions of striped bass taken from the river a month, but only one portion for the “sensitive population”). The announcement marks quite the turnaround considering that only a few decades ago, the Hudson was thought of as an “open cesspool” riddled with noxious industrial chemicals. It has already sparked a flurry of interest among local anglers in New York who are catching – and now eating – their supper.
Similarly, it is now deemed safe to consume certain fish, in certain quantities, from the Rhine in Germany, which runs through Urosevic’s native city of Düsseldorf. He has happily gobbled up fish from that river. Like the Hudson, the Rhine was once a crucible of the chemical industry, and in 1986 was the scene of one of Europe’s worst environmental disasters as a factory fire led to a tide of pesticides, mercury and other toxins sweeping into the river, turning the water red and killing an estimated half a million fish.
The Thames has followed a similar trajectory. Since being declared biologically dead due to severe industrial pollution in 1957, the river has made a rapid recovery over subsequent decades and is now home to an estimated 115 species of fish. However, despite these improvements, the river continues to be blighted by sewage pollution and a cocktail of toxic chemicals.
The official advice as to whether it is actually safe to eat a Thames fish is far less clear-cut than for some of its counterparts. A request to Thames Water sees me referred to the Environment Agency, which in turn refers me to the Angling Trust. A separate request to the Food Standards Agency elicits the response that “there is currently no evidence that fish caught in UK waters are unsafe to eat”. However, the same statement also advises recreational anglers not to eat fish caught in areas with “visible signs of pollution such as sewage spills and algal blooms”. Given that last year alone, raw sewage was discharged into England’s rivers 291,492 times, spanning nearly 1.9 million hours, this appears to rule out much of our waterways.
While the £4.6bn Tideway Tunnel, a vast 16-mile “super sewer” running through central London, became fully operational last year and to date has diverted more than 20 million tons of sewage from the Thames, experts say the river is still suffering from sewage pollution due to the poor state of many of its tributaries. According to newly published figures, last year Thames Water was responsible for a third of the most harmful pollution incidents across the entire sector, the worst of any water company for the second year running. A few days before Urosevic and I go fishing on the Thames near Lambeth Bridge, an E. coli reading of 58,000 bacteria per 100ml of water (58 times the threshold for “poor quality” bathing water) was recorded just upstream at Fulham Reach Boat Club due to sewage being discharged into the river. Thames Water said the release happened as part of “planned maintenance works”.
We climb a steep staircase down to the river early on a weekday morning. The Thames is at low tide, a scene described by Wordsworth in 1802 as the “mighty heart of London lying still”. Amid the shoreline detritus, we find what we presume to be old cattle bones and a jaw containing five blackened teeth. Big Ben tolls and Thames Clippers cut oily swaths through the water.
As we cast a few hopeful lines into the water, we notice that we are in the shadow of a (mercifully closed) sewage outflow pipe. Hardly an appetising scene, but still, we crunch over native oyster shells (once a staple of the British diet) and Urosevic is convinced that he sees a fish rise in the river murk.
Not long ago, there was some gastronomic appeal to Thames fish. In 2013, the renowned chef Philip Cooper established a pop-up called Riverfood, with ingredients including pike, zander and crayfish sourced mainly from the Thames to demonstrate the culinary delights of the river. Three years later, Gordon Ramsay cooked and ate a London catch of eels for an episode of his show The F Word.
At the time of his retirement from Parliament in 2010, the Labour MP for Reading West and parliamentary spokesman for angling, Martin Salter, posed for photographs on the south bank of the Thames in a fishing stunt designed to demonstrate the improving fortunes of the river. Salter was quoted in a news report saying he had eaten Thames trout in the past, describing them as “delicious”. However, when I track him down, he insists that his comments were taken out of context. Rather than this being a John Gummer moment, when the then Conservative agriculture minister ate a beefburger with his four-year-old daughter in 1990 during the height of the BSE crisis, Salter insists that he was not encouraging anybody to eat fish from the Thames. The trout in question, he says, was taken from the upper reaches of the river “many years ago”.
Now a fishing blogger and head of policy for the Angling Trust, Salter says he has long operated as an entirely catch-and-release fisherman. That is the case for the vast majority of anglers along both the Thames and around England (as attested to by the fact that comedians Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse, in their BBC television show Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, always release their fish). Strict bylaws prevent the killing of many more delectable river fish. Salmon, for example, which have (very) tentatively returned to the Thames after being declared extinct during the Industrial Revolution, are strictly prohibited to be removed. The same is true for sea trout and European eels – the original street food of Victorian London, served stewed, jellied and baked into pies – now declared critically endangered.
Anglers are allowed to keep trout measuring more than 25cm, grayling, small pike and various species of coarse fish, which, although edible, are not typically eaten. Despite an extensive trawl among various fishing groups, I cannot find a single person who does keep them. For many, such as Salter, it is for conservation reasons and a long-standing culture among anglers of working to improve the fish stocks of the Thames. For others, it is also matched with a concern over the health implications of eating fish from the river.
“I’ve never eaten a Thames fish and I wouldn’t,” says Tim Pottage, a 43-year-old Londoner and fishing guide, who echoes the sentiments of many. One of the main species he fishes for in the Thames are thin-lipped mullet: bottom-feeding fish that Pottage says tend to congregate around sewage outflows. They are renowned among anglers as spirited fighters, and whenever Pottage has hooked one in the Thames, he has noticed they tend to give up after only 10 or so seconds, meekly accepting their fate.
Dr David J Solomon, a retired fisheries scientist, lifelong angler and author of A History of Fish and Fisheries of the River Thames, has eaten several species from the river over the years, including pike, perch and gudgeon. The 78-year-old describes them unenthusiastically as muddy-tasting and rather “hard work”. Until the 19th century, however, the 215-mile river occupied a vital role as a fishery. According to Solomon, the Domesday survey of 1086 recorded 163 fisheries upstream of London Bridge. Eel and lamprey were so ubiquitous that they were used as a form of rent payment. In medieval London, Solomon has written, pike was considered a prized delicacy more expensive than salmon.
Roach, perch and dace were all commonly eaten, while gudgeon picnics were a popular Victorian social event on the Thames, whereby families would gather to catch the small fish and cook them on the riverbank. Eel Pie Island, given its name in the 19th century, is a landmark in the river at Twickenham. However, as the burgeoning railway network increasingly linked coastal and urban areas together throughout the 19th century, the sea rapidly became our primary source of fish, and the rivers were left as mere dumping grounds.
Gudgeon, a small, moustachioed bottom-feeding fish that is only a few inches long and has black bars along its flanks, is precisely the sort of overlooked species that Urosevic advocates eating. The fish can be caught on tiny hooks baited with maggots or red worms. We have returned from the river to his flat to eat four of the fish he has sourced from a supplier on the river Bourne, a distant tributary of the Thames in Kent. It is a species yet to feature on his list, and he is giddy with excitement. This enthusiasm is clearly infectious: he has more than a million followers across the various social media platforms on which he details his culinary escapades.
After graduating from school, Urosevic moved to London in 2001 to complete a degree at the European Business School. A short career in property investment banking followed, but after a few miserable years, he quit to train at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris before opening a fish restaurant in Düsseldorf. He returned to London in 2020 to work as a fishmonger and in 2023 completed an intense training course at the Transgourmet Seafood Academy in Germany, making him Britain’s first “fish sommelier”.
He credits his piscatorial obsession to his grandmother Pipa, who would cook beautiful meals in the house he grew up in with his architect father and dentist mother. As he artfully dips whole gudgeon into tempura batter and lowers them into cooking oil, he speaks evangelically about the untapped potential of UK river fish (not least how they could take the pressure off dwindling stocks of the likes of cod and haddock). “We have lost home-grown fish as part of our diet and we just don’t know that we’ve lost it,” he argues. “I guarantee you that a deep-fried zander or even catfish will taste just as delicious in fish and chips.”
In the hope of one day soon starting to eat fish from the Thames, he has spent a fair bit of time combing the available water-quality data, but believes that there is insufficient official guidance on exactly what might be going into fish and the possible implications for human health. The latest State of the River Thames report, published earlier this year by the Zoological Society of London, reveals that long-term indicators for dissolved oxygen, phosphorus and heavy metals are improving, although those for nitrates (of which agricultural fertilisers and sewage pollution remain a key source) are continuing to decline. Of particular worry is the reading for “chemicals of emerging concern”, a vast gamut that includes pharmaceuticals, pesticides and toxic perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, or “forever chemicals”), and microplastics, on which the report warns there is insufficient data to determine the current impact on the river.
Since 2009, Prof Leon Barron has been working to establish exactly what chemicals are present in the Thames. In 2023, Barron, who leads the Emerging Chemical Contaminants team within Imperial College London’s Environmental Research Group, co-authored a paper demonstrating 98 contaminants detected in the Thames between 2019 and 2021. These include pesticides, antibiotics, antidepressants and illicit drugs such as cocaine leaching into the river alongside phosphates and nitrates.
A current nationwide study that Barron and colleagues are working on, using data from the Great UK WaterBlitz campaign (which engages citizen scientists to test the country’s waterways), has revealed that the chemical of greatest concern ending up in our rivers is an insecticide called imidacloprid, banned for agricultural use in 2018 but still found in tick treatments for cats and dogs. Barron says the treatment, which is extremely toxic even in low concentrations, is now increasingly being used prophylactically by pet owners and ending up in wastewater, a harmful practice that he equates to taking antibiotics all year round.
Barron’s research has also focused on how chemicals end up in river invertebrates such as freshwater shrimp. He says illegal drugs have been detected in “most, if not all” of the Thames invertebrates tested – perhaps not a surprise when London has frequently been found to have more cocaine in its sewage than any other city in Europe. A recent project conducted by Imperial College researchers alongside the Home Office testing recreational drugs in wastewater found spikes during bank holiday weekends and landmark events such as Eurovision and the World Cup. In laboratory settings, high dosages of cocaine have been shown to influence the behaviour of salmon and eels, although Barron points out that this does not necessarily extend to the wild.
Microplastics are a growing addition to this toxic cocktail: studies have shown that the Thames has some of the highest concentrations recorded for any body of water in the world. One 2020 study found 94,000 pieces flowing per second in parts of the river.
Dr Ria Devereux, an environmental research fellow at the University of East London, is leading a new study testing microplastic prevalence in the Thames downstream of the Tideway Tunnel from Teddington in south-west London to the estuary mouth at Southend, Essex, where she has documented 91 active sewage outflows along the river. As well as contaminating river ecosystems and leaching chemicals into the water, these fragments of plastic, she says, act as “chemical sponges” that absorb high concentrations of other toxic pollutants in the river.
The Thames has played a large role in Devereux’s life, and she describes the river simply as representing “home”. She grew up in Dagenham and is the daughter of a London cabbie. Her grandfather was also a Thames fisherman and would often taken her to the seaside at Southend and attempt to cajole her into eating jellied eels. Would she consider eating a Thames fish today, I wonder. “From my research and things coming out from others, I wouldn’t touch fish in the Thames,” she says, adding for emphasis: “That’s a hard no.”
Prof Jamie Woodward, a geographer at the University of Manchester, is part of a small group of researchers who were first to highlight the extent of microplastic pollution in urban rivers. In particular, his research has demonstrated a direct link between poor wastewater management and the prevalence of microplastics in England’s rivers and has shown that only water companies reducing sewage dumping can improve the problem. Woodward says microplastics have been traced in the major organs of river fish, chiefly through their consumption of plastic-contaminated invertebrates in a process known as trophic transfer. Even with the fish gutted, he says, it is not yet clear how much of the microplastics could transfer to the flesh and, ultimately, into people.
Woodward can see positives in the future of rivers across the country and particularly the urban waterways currently most afflicted with sewage dumping. He points to the government pledge to reduce sewage pollution from storm overflows by half by the end of the decade, increasing oversight over the water companies and, above all, addressing the public demand for cleaner rivers. “There is much work to be done, but there has been a change in attitude and there is a huge amount of momentum now that means things must get better,” he says.
Back in Urosevic’s flat, the gudgeon is eventually served, beautifully presented, almost suspended in motion in tempura batter on a bed of lettuce with ginger and a blob of wasabi. We crunch up the fish in two bites. It is delicious and indeed superior to much of the imported whitebait served in restaurants across the land. Along with butterflied grayling (a dish that Urosevic once prepared with a fish caught from Hampshire’s river Anton), gudgeon tempura would make a fine addition to London restaurant menus.
I ask whether he ever feels guilty about his mission to eat every species of fish, to which he replies incredulously: “That is like feeling guilty for being alive.” His pledge bears echoes of the eccentric Victorian palaeontologist William Buckland, who once strived to eat every animal on Earth. Buckland’s argument was that “the stomach, sir, rules the world”. Urosevic hopes that it might just be the thing to finally help clean up our rivers.
