Lara Maiklem
The best-known of London’s Mudlarks, and author of its definitive tome, tells us of time-travel and treasure on the banks of the Thames.
IAM A MUDLARK. I wander the shores of the River Thames at low tide searching for the lost and forgotten objects that tell tales of the past and bring forgotten Londoners to life. I often walk little more than a mile in five hours, yet I can travel 2000 years back in time. Sometimes I hike for several miles in the pre-dawn darkness, through the bleak marshes of the Thames Estuary, just to get to the river in time for low tide, where I spend my time slurping and staggering through joint-wrenching mud, searching for what others have cast away.
I began mudlarking quite organically. For years the river had been my go-to place in the chaos of the city. I walked the river paths and spent hours staring out over its writhing khaki currents as they slid past. Then one day I found myself at the top of a set of old wooden river stairs, looking down onto
“A weekly amble in central London, no metal detector, no digging, just looking, lost in the minutiae of my surroundings…”
the foreshore itself. Until this point it had never occurred to me to go down and get muddy. I was a typical Londoner, the river was there, but somehow out of bounds, an important yet often inconvenient part of the city.
Since then, it has become my obsession. A weekly amble in central London, no metal detector, no digging, just looking, lost in the minutiae of my surroundings, or a bracing march further east, along a foreshore that speaks to me of sailing ships and far-off lands, industry and war. The foreshore in the city is an escape; in the estuary it is life affirming. The rest of my week is spent researching what I find, discovering the past and filling my head with deliciously irrelevant information that I find in obscure books, by traipsing around countless museums and of course by consulting the internet.
Mudlarking really is the most all-consuming pastime, and I’m lucky it is just a pastime. I tread in the footsteps of the original mudlarks of the 18th and 19th century, who scavenged the river for rags, bone, copper nails, tools, wood, coal, anything they could use or sell to survive. They were the poorest of the poor, old people and children with no other
option than to wade through freezing cold, stinking river mud to keep themselves from the horrors of the workhouse. I think of them almost every time I go. Instead of rags and coal, I return from the tides with curious things: a chunk of Roman floor embedded with mosaic tiles; a Mesolithic flint tool; a 17th-century pocket sundial; a Saxon buckle plate; the ceramic tops from Tudor money boxes; a Victorian love token. Being the first person to touch these objects since they were lost or thrown away is like reaching back through time to hold hands with the past. The Thames hides a mixed-up muddle of forgotten history, each tide delivers something new, and I return from every walk with a new story to tell.
Lara Maiklem regularly posts her foreshore finds on Instagram as @London.mudlark and on Twitter and Facebook as @LondonMudlark. Her book Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames (Bloomsbury) is available online and in bookshops now.