Dan Murroni at Fish Planet

WHEN he had 40 aquaria in his flat and hundreds of visitors wanting to swap their Blue Velvet shrimp for his Dwarf Pea puffers, it was time for Dan Murroni to open a shop.

That was in 2021, and now Finsbury Park’s Fish Planet London is the fastest-growing aquatic company in the country.

“Some people watch Netflix, others watch their fish tank,” said Mr Murroni.

“It’s not just for the beauty, everything moves slowly in the tank. In London, everybody’s running around, trying to make money, but when you have a hobby like this it forces you to change your mindset. It makes you understand there is another way of living.”

When the company he worked for went bust during lockdown, Mr Murroni – who has kept fish since he was a child in Italy – began sourcing more aquaria for his home fish room and posting about his aquatic collection on Instagram.

“Everybody started asking me, ‘where can I come to buy those fish?’,” he said. “I started to think… maybe people in London want to buy fish, is this a real thing?”

He started swapping fish on Gumtree and inviting his followers over to buy them. After a few months, the house was full of people every day and Mr Murroni decided to move the fish room into a commercial space, and so Fish Planet London was born.

“I started to understand I can’t just be just a fish lover, I need to be a leader,” he said.

A Balloon Molly

“This hobby is dying, and the city has really needed something like this for a long time, so my mindset now is not just about selling fish, but reinventing the industry.”

The kaleidoscope of fish and high-tech tanks available at Fish Planet are a far cry from the dingy pet shop that will let you buy a goldfish in a bag of water.

Every tank in Mr Murroni’s store is individually filtered – so disease can’t spread between tanks – and there is a quarantine station in the back for new arrivals.

The business imports fish from “literally everywhere”, including Thailand, Taiwan, India and China.

With such an exotic selection, is there a risk that naïve buyers don’t look after their new pets properly?

“If you come to the store, we make sure you are the right customer for that fish,” Mr Murroni said, adding: “We have a very strict protocol and we ask a lot of questions. If they don’t pass, we educate them, and sometimes the fish they wanted to buy is not suitable for them.”

There are beginner fish – a goldfish or, like Mr Murroni’s first, guppy – and then more advanced fish, like stingrays.

“My favourite is the fish I have never seen before,” he said, although he is a fan of the Pikachu-looking amphibians, axolotls, of which he once had 21.

Fish Planet London is growing. It has a brand new 500-tank store in Shoreditch and just won Practical Fishkeeping magazine’s Best Aquatic Company of the Year in London for the third year in a row.

“My life is completely different,” said Mr Murroni.

“Sometimes I just miss sleeping, I miss being a normal person. But at the end of day, I’m aware that what happened to Fish Planet is not something that happens to everyone.”

He added: “There is so much love and support and even as we grow we still have the same vibes as before. It’s a community, in the end.”