Silver Shoals: The Five Fish That Made Britain

Silver Shoals tells the story of fish in Britain and the fishermen whose lives are bound up with them.

Using the compass points as a structure, Charles Rangeley Wilson looks at cod in the North, eels in the East, Carp in the South, salmon in the West, and bookends this with a meditation on the herring seas of his Norfolk village.

Charles meets fishermen up and down the country and hears their story. His journey includes an unforgettable ten days on an North Atlantic Trawler, an attempt to bag his first elusive carp, afternoons wiled away with Fenland eel netters, and a near-futile search for the last remaining East coast herring boats.

Underpinning this journey is a bigger historical exploration of these creatures that shaped our island story. We learn how, centuries before our current crisis of over-fishing, fish were caught and sold in their millions; it was for good reason this scaly currency was once dubbed 'fish silver'. And we see how fish and fishing have long imprinted our landscape, from the astonishing historical migratory patterns of salmon to the carp whose ponds shaped our medieval topography.

Of course there is an environmental dimension to the story of fish. But Charles' optimistic perspective is this: no one is more invested in fish than the fishermen whose lives depend on them. If we can find a way to harness that, as has begun in countries like Iceland, then the future of fish in Britain could be as extraordinary as its past.