UK TOUR 2026 · BREEDER VISIT · Andrew Barton

A Visit with Andrew Barton

On The Goldfish Council’s UK tour, a short detour to Wellingborough showed us how Andrew Barton, one of Britain’s most successful exhibitors, keeps veiltails, moors and Bristol shubunkins in flowing water, with plants doing the filtering and no air pumps at all.

By Bryan Rhodes | The Goldfish Council

Andrew Barton’s main fish house in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.

As we continued our UK goldfish tour, we stopped by Andrew Barton’s house. Since the National Goldfish Show was in Coventry, it was only a slight detour over to Wellingborough to see Andrew’s goldfish setup.

Three of us from The Goldfish Council made the trip: Gary Hater, the Council’s founder; Rob Crosby, one of our regional directors; and me. At the National Show, Andrew’s fish were hard to miss on the benches. In Wellingborough we got to see how he raises them, and what we found was a system built around moving water instead of bubbles.

Gary Hater (left) with our host, Andrew Barton, beside the garden pond.

Meet Andrew

Andrew needs little introduction among British fancy goldfish keepers. He has served as president of the Association of Midland Goldfish Keepers (AMGK) and as chairman of the Nationwide Standards Committee, which looks after the breed standards used to judge fancy goldfish at Nationwide shows across the UK. At this year’s National Fancy Goldfish Open Show, held October 3 at the Wyken Community Centre in Coventry, he was Show Manager. He was also one of the most successful exhibitors in a show of more than 250 entries. His fish won the adult Metallic Veiltail, Nacreous Veiltail, Bristol Shubunkin, Metallic Fantail and Lionhead classes, and one of his broadtail moors took second in the Moor class. In 2019, one of his metallic veiltails was Best in Show at the same event.

We weren’t the first visitors to make the trip. Practical Fishkeeping’s staff visited Andrew in 2010, and when the magazine featured him in 2016 it noted that he “maintains a 60-year-old strain of Bristol shubunkins.” Keeping one line going that long takes patience and a reliable system, and Andrew’s fish houses have both.

Two fish houses and a garden full of water

Outdoor ponds run along the fence, leading to Andrew’s smaller fish house at the end of the ponds. The main fish house is behind the photographer.

Andrew’s back yard is a working garden. A row of rectangular ponds runs along one fence, each under a mesh frame, with lily pads showing through the wire. An ornamental pond edged with granite setts sits in the lawn.

Inside the larger house, a paved path runs down the middle over a bed of gravel. Glass tanks line the left side in two tiers, with blue tubs tucked underneath, and big black tubs sit at waist height along the right. Strip lights hang from the ridge, and white plastic pipework runs everywhere: along the rafters, down the uprights and across the floor.

Inside the larger fish house: glass tanks to the left, black tubs to the right, pipework overhead and underfoot.

Elsewhere in the large fish house is a side room painted a cheerful turquoise. In the smaller fish house, tanks are stacked on tall wooden shelving beside a deep white sink.

Andrew (left) and Rob Crosby talk shop between the shelves of the smaller fish house.

The tanks are bare-bottomed. The front glass is kept clear for viewing, but the backs and sides are left coated in green algae that glows when the sun comes through the roof, and several tanks run green water as well. That might alarm a keeper used to crystal-clear aquariums, but green water has long been treated as an asset in British fish houses. Practical Fishkeeping’s 1980s profile of the West Midlands breeder Tommy Sutton noted that green water “is actually of benefit,” and Great Yarmouth breeder Mark Brumell put it more bluntly: “algae is filtration, and algae is food.”

Gary Hater photographs a tank of youngsters in the main fish house.

Moving water instead of bubbles

What makes Andrew’s setup worth the detour is the way he handles water. Many fish rooms run on air, with pumps humming, airstones bubbling and a sponge filter in every tank. Andrew’s tanks have none of that. Instead, the water itself keeps moving. White pipes along the rafters drop down to the tanks, with valves along the way to set the flow, and surplus water leaves through overflows and standpipes. The water is always cycling, and new water is drawn from the city supply when it is needed.

Rob Crosby looks along a row of veiltail tanks in the main fish house, with Michael Kirkham behind him.

The logic is simple, and it’s sound biology. In a closed tank, ammonia from the fish and from decaying food builds up between water changes, and a filter has to deal with it. In Andrew’s system the water never sits still. It carries waste out of the tanks as it circulates, plants and bacteria deal with that waste along the way, and fresh city water tops the system up as needed. Oxygen largely takes care of itself, too. Water reaching each tank carries oxygen picked up on its way around the system, the surface exchanges gas with the air, and by day the algae on the glass add oxygen of their own. At night the algae use oxygen instead, which is one more reason the steady flow matters.

Why skip the air pumps altogether? One likely benefit is that, without bubbles, it is easy to see the fish themselves. Another is comfort: veiltails and moors are poor swimmers with long, delicate fins, and calm water without a column of bubbles is easy on both.

The system saves work, too: there are no sponge filters to squeeze out.

The far end of the larger fish house in the back corner. Moors fill the two upper tanks at right, and straight ahead in the image are two tanks of calico fantails.

Letting plants do the filtering

At the main fish house, the moving water also passes through plants (see next page). Large black troughs outside are packed with leafy green growth, with white pipework running into them.

Pond keepers call this a vegetable filter or a bog filter, and the biology is the same whatever the name. As water moves slowly through the root mass, bacteria living on the roots convert ammonia to nitrite and then to nitrate, and the plants take up nitrate and phosphate to build new leaves. What would be a waste problem in a tank becomes plant growth in a trough. It’s low-tech, there’s no filter media to replace, and on the sunny day we visited, the troughs looked as healthy as the fish.

Andrew (left) shows Rob Crosby and Michael Kirkham around the large fish house. The planted trough at right is part of the plant filter.

The fish

For all the engineering, the fish are the point, and Andrew’s did not disappoint. Veiltails are a specialty, in both red metallic and calico (nacreous) forms. They are a fitting fish for American visitors to admire in an English garden. The veiltail was developed in Philadelphia in the 1890s, and British breeders have long kept lines of their own. Andrew’s veiltails won both adult veiltail classes at the National Show, metallic and nacreous.

All of us were impressed with the development of the UK fantail as a breed. As far as we know, no hobbyists in the USA line-breed fantails, so it was a pleasure to see such quality specimens in Andrew’s fish house. Andrew has both calico and red metallic fantails, but I definitely preferred the calico fantails, especially for the intensity of coloration his fish possessed.

Calico veiltails, their long fins speckled with black.

A red metallic veiltail with its long tail edged in white.

A calico fantail with amazing coloration.

A UK-bred broadtail moor: velvet black, with large, round eyes.

The moors deserve a mention of their own. The Nationwide standard asks for a metallic black fish with a velvety finish, large spherical eyes that project outward and slightly forward, and veiltail-style finnage. As one British variety guide puts it, the moor is “in effect, a jet black veiltail with spherical protruding eyes.” Andrew’s moor took second place at the National Show.

Then there are the Bristol shubunkins, a variety as British as its name. The Bristol Aquarists’ Society produced the first Bristol shubunkin standard in 1934. Today’s standard calls for a slender calico fish with at least a quarter of its body blue, and a large, well-spread single tail with big rounded lobes. Andrew’s Bristols won both the adult class and the team class at the National Show.

One of the three Bristol Shubunkins Andrew entered as a team at the National Show. The team took first place.

He breeds other varieties as well. His metallic fantails and lionheads also won their adult classes at the National Show, and the Nationwide breeders’ register has listed him for ranchu, orandas, redcaps, tosakin and pom-pons.

The ideas we brought home

We left Wellingborough with full camera rolls and a long list of ideas. The biggest is that clean water doesn’t have to come from filters and air pumps. Andrew’s system rests on two simple principles: keep the water moving, and let plants and algae take up the waste.

Anyone tempted to try flow-through at home should start with the water supply. More than 30 percent of large U.S. water systems use chloramine, by one EPA estimate, and it remains in solution longer than chlorine. Fish and pond keepers have to neutralize or remove it, and a system fed from the city supply needs that treatment every time new water goes in. A system like Andrew’s is as much about the water you put in as the water you take out.

Our thanks to Andrew for his time, his hospitality, and his patience with three Americans asking about every pipe in the place.