Freshwater mills historically were found throughout England serving a wide variety of uses. The decline in the need for water power over the last 100 years saw a reduction in the number of operational mills. Despite this decline, the associated river structures were rarely removed and many of these have exceeded their design life and have failed or are now starting to fail, with important geomorphological implications for the river. This paper investigates the geomorphological impacts of mills and their structures on English rivers, and considers their legacy for the contemporary management of these systems.

The number of river restoration projects undertaken in the UK has increased rapidly over the last five years. However, schemes are still largely undertaken on an ad‐hoc basis rather than part of a co‐ordinated, strategic, catchment restoration strategy. Additionally, project level restoration is rarely initiated through a systematic approach that involves all stages from baseline studies through to design, installation, monitoring and post‐project appraisals. The need for both strategic and project levels to be undertaken effectively is necessary if the requirements of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) are to be met. This directive has the potential to significantly increase the number of schemes, as restoration of surface water bodies has become a key duty of member states. There exists, therefore, a need for a holistic catchment scale approach to restoration to be adopted to maximise benefit to the fluvial systems and ensure compliance. This paper outlines key components of strategic and project level protocols for river restoration from a UK perspective.

Monitoring is an important aspect of any procedure that seeks to determine whether a technique has worked effectively. The river restoration process is no different. Unfortunately, monitoring is often not undertaken due to constraints on time and resources, as well as the commonly held belief that river restoration is inherently a good thing and, as a result, monitoring is unnecessary. There are many reasons to monitor projects and among the most important is the need to learn from experiences and for regulatory compliance. This paper examines the issues associated with the monitoring of river restoration schemes. In particular, it details monitoring selection models focusing on those associated with ecology and geomorphology. The paper also considers the requirements of monitoring schemes that will help deliver the goals of the Water Framework Directive (WFD).

With growing investment in river restoration, we increasingly need to justify costs by demonstrating success and wider benefits of measures. To aid practitioners, the UK River Restoration Centre has worked with experts to develop a practical monitoring guidance that links objectives to specific monitoring to demonstrate achievable outcomes. Feedback, however, via an online questionnaire highlighted the need to rationalise the guidance contents for a new growing audience, taking advantage of new developments and incorporating the evaluation of social and economic aspects of river restoration. With these potential improvements, it is hoped that practitioners will follow this guidance, improve the quality of monitoring undertaken and share evidence of success and lessons learnt. This paper outlines how this guidance has been adopted as best practice. We discuss why we need to embed this guidance into wider monitoring protocols that can feed into national and international environmental policy and targets.

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