City of Rivers was actually shot in Sheffield, not in Shipley, and steals its name from a leaflet on that city’s various waterways. The film is, however, topped and tailed with footage of the Bradford Beck (outtakes from our other short film made around the same time, Wading to Shipley). 

This film documents the after-party at a “think tank” event on river stewardship, hosted in July 2013 by the Environment Agency and the Sheffield-based River Stewardship Company. It seeks to capture a sense of both:

(a) the energy and enthusiasm of some of those people who work, professionally, on maintaining and improving our northern, post-industrial rivers (i.e. the human aspect of “agencies”, which is too little recognised by the wider community); and,

(b) the complexity and challenges of improving river stewardship, since such work necessarily involves multiple partners, multiple land-owners, and multiple communities — linked together by the upstream/downstream flow of rivers, but often with little else in common.

We hope you enjoy the film.

Directed by Steve Bottoms

Edited by Tom Blagden

With special thanks to Jonathan Moxon