Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames,

Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames

The Thames is the only reason for London. Without the river, London would now be, at best, a dreary little village with a Costcutter and a failing pub. London’s history is locked in the mud, gradually disgorged onto the foreshore by rising tides or the wash of boats, and picked up by a ragged army of mudlarks.

Lara Maiklem is one of them, and her superb book is a companionable invitation to join her as she slithers down the steps onto the mud, puts on her kneepads, snaps on her rubber gloves, tucks her hair out of her eyes and goes time-travelling.

I would have been happy if all of Maiklem’s 319 pages had been just one long, gloriously jumbled list of artefacts, to which I could have fitted a story myself. She tells us about pins that must have secured Elizabethan ruffs; a pewter syringe from Bankside for giving mercury to syphilitics; a Tudor cow-mouth shoe with the imprint of the last owner’s foot; a Wiccan spell jar, wrapped in black plastic, with an onion inside; Roman castration clamps from London Bridge; a lead musket ball with a human tooth embedded in it; caulking irons from Rotherhithe, for pushing oakum into ship seams; animal bones from Henry VIII’S banquets; a young man, lying face down, with his shirt still tucked neatly in; other corpses so bloated that they are mistaken for armchairs; cow horns that might have gored a dog at the baiting pit near the Globe; a grey, plastic brick, impregnated with human ashes; a 16th-century pocket sundial, not for time-keeping, but to remind the owner of his mortality; false teeth; vulcanite bottle stoppers; and silk stockings waving round the broken bellies of teapots in the junk cliffs of Tilbury.

But this is so much more than a charismatic list. It’s an account of the mudlarkers themselves, and so of obsession and ownership and intimate engagement with space and time. We’re introduced to Johnny, who picks over ‘his’ 50-square-foot patch for up to four hours at a time, and says that when he steps onto the foreshore, he’s entering ‘a portal to another world’. We meet Mike, who combs the beach at Vauxhall, and who found out when he was six that he was adopted, concluded that he didn’t have a history, and has been searching for history ever since. We learn about the two great divisions within mudlarking – between the find-driven hunters (mostly men), with their metal detectors and spades, and the gatherers (mostly women), for whom the search is the thing, and who are content with what the river chooses to show them.

It’s a tale of the river as divine: a repository of sacrifices, prayers, thanks and desperate secrets, understood best today by British Hindus, who have adopted it as a sister of the Ganges. And it’s an exploration of the presence of the past. If you crack open a piece of the thick, comfortable, domestic pottery of the Middle Ages, the Ages themselves seep out into your fingers. The belching of Falstaffian roisterers, the songs of sailors and the moans of the

suicides haven’t gone far. You’ve just got to get your ear in.

But most of all, like all reflective books, it is necessarily political, though it never for a moment preaches. Maiklem is gently but passionately angry about our contempt for the river: about the island at Hammersmith made of wet wipes, and about the ‘fatbergs’ – great, growing lumps of fat, hard as concrete, and studded with tampons, hypodermic needles and toilet paper. The biggest (under the streets of Whitechapel) was longer than Tower Bridge, and weighed as much as 11 double-decker buses.

Maiklem rejoices in little things, knowing that they mean a million times more than the big flourishes of history. A button means more than a treaty or a war, if only because the only conceivable justification of a treaty or a war is to allow people to do up and undo buttons. Parliaments? Palaces? These are dull, secondary and parasitic. At their most glorious, they are hopelessly outshone by a child’s toy.

Maiklem and her hordes of the undead dead are the best imaginable company on her trip downriver from Teddington to the estuary. She tells history the only way it should be told.

I was sorry to wave goodbye to her as she packed the day’s finds into her rucksack and set off home, but the dead stayed with me.