Mudlark’d: Hidden Histories from the River Thames

Malcolm Russell (Thames & Hudson, £25)

THIS is a book inspired by the joy of holding a fragment of the past in your hand, of a find being passed around friends and of the stories that are unleashed. It is a conscious reaction against hands-off text-book history, always taught, never experienced.

As a mudlark, you are turning over wet stones embedded in slimy

mud constantly churned over by the tide-worked banks of the Thames. This river has served as one of the great highways of international trade, but also as a common sewer.

It is one of the joys of being a mudlark that you are not trespassing on the jealously preserved (and beautifully analysed layers) of an archaeological dig, but rummaging around in one of the last great common spaces of England (its tidal shore)—not so much stealing buried treasure as sifting dumped rubbish.

The broken stems of tobacco pipes are the easiest thing to find and identify. Malcolm Russell uses these worthless fragments to take us on a journey of historical imagination, back to the first trading links with native Americans. We follow bent coins into the bedrooms of lovers; fragments of Roman pottery, lumps of sea-coal and shards of medieval German saltglaze pots open up storylines. These stories are sometimes highly selective, with an almost whimsical connection to a found object, but with an ear for the margins of society, snappily dressed costermongers, shifting patterns of gender, mountebank public performance dentists and sex-trade workers. We listen out for the arrival of immigrants, be they the powerful Hanse merchants of the Baltic, Huguenot refugees or Lascar sailors, who all bring new skills. The book is itself a thing of beauty, with handsome illustrations and Mathew Williams-ellis’s foreshore photographs that help us take off on flights of fancy from a handful of rusty buttons and pottery shards. Barnaby Rogerson