A few years ago I was sent a picture of a cracked stoneware flagon with the words “G Todd, Grocer, Greenwich” printed on it and a note from a mudlark saying that she had found the treasure washed up on the shore of the Thames and had traced it to my great-great-great grandfather. It felt like a message from the past.
Three years later I find myself travelling with Lara Maiklem, another mudlark, to Greenwich to learn the art of mudlarking, which dates from early Victorian times, when women and children scavenged Dickens’s “slime and ooze” for fragments to use or sell — discarded rope, nails and coins on the riverbed. Now mudlarks are hobbyists who spend their spare time sifting through the flotsam of the Thames to discover what it has divulged that day and envelop themselves in another world.
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“The story of London is locked away in the mud of the Thames, and it’s irresistible,” says Maiklem, who meets me dressed in jeans and knee pads, holding a pair of efficient-looking latex gloves. “Picking up an object that hasn’t been touched for centuries is like reaching back to shake hands with history.”
Maiklem’s book on the subject, Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames, is a bestseller, and on July 4 she published A Mudlarking Year, Finding Treasure in Every Season. She has been searching the banks of the Thames for more than 20 years. Mudlarking has helped her through the death of her father, “smoothed her way into marriage” and given her breathing space while parenting twins. Sarah, her wife, a “foreshore widow”, does not share her passion. “She thinks I’m mad,” Maiklem says, laughing. But the Thames is her lucky dip.
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“The prizes I seek are the cast-offs and losses of generations: a pair of Roman castration clamps, a musket ball, a George III farthing. It is the closest thing I can imagine to time travel and it is addictive. Every tide turns another page in this history book.”
The practice of mudlarking takes time, patience and equal measures of knowledge and luck, she explains. “I love speculating, because I am not a historian or an archaeologist. Mudlarking tells the story of forgotten people. One of my favourite finds is 500 years old. It’s a little Tudor shoe, and because the Thames is anaerobic [which means organic matter is prevented from breaking down], when I pulled it out of the mud I could see the imprint of the toes and heel. It must have fallen off a child’s foot.”
Maiklem has timed our visit for low tide at 6.25pm. We’re early, so we go and wait in a pub. “Hopefully there won’t be any sewage today,” she says, as the sunlight dances over the waves. “The Thames, when it’s not being used as a sewer, is the best place in the world to mudlark because it has 2,000 years of history. It has always taken us out into the world and brought the world to us. The Seine in Paris isn’t tidal, Amsterdam is amazing but only when they drain the canals. Kids go diving for stuff in the Ganges. Rivers attract rubbish but there is something magical about them.”
Her family, she explains, were farmers rather than foragers. Maiklem, now in her forties, grew up in a farmhouse in Surrey, graduating from Newcastle University before moving to London to work in publishing. “I was in a soul-destroying job, so I began going to the river and fell in love with it. Then one day I saw these steps going down to the shore and I found a clay pipe. I quickly needed the next hit.”
In her rucksack she has brought some of her favourite possessions. “This is a 16th-century nit comb, here’s a tiny Victorian doll — called a frozen Charlotte — they used to bake into puddings, and a pipe that dates from 1580, when tobacco first came over.” Her enthusiasm infects everyone around her. They are all beautifully made works of art; the pipes are still black from the people who smoked them. My favourite is a 16th-century button in the shape of an acorn.
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Her house, Maiklem admits, is crammed with river remnants, but she often gives objects away when she is doing talks at schools, so children can touch history. “School wasn’t the place for me. The history didn’t inspire me, which is why I now go into classrooms, and love to see [pupils] engaging. I don’t want to be the mad old woman who gets dug out by her kids, so I do give stuff away.” I feel the smoothness of a buckle plate. “That’s Viking. It came from Iceland originally. Anything over 300 years old has to be officially recorded and written up on the database for things found in fields, shores and rivers.”
As we wander down to the shoreline, past a medieval jetty, she crouches, explaining her methods as she presses her nose to the foreshore. “You need to get your eye in. First you see one button, then another. It’s all very organic. I went through a stage of pipes. There are also cigarette ends and vapes and laughing gas canisters. The jetsam reflects the eras. I sometimes wonder, if the river drained completely one night, what would there be? Old bikes, a few bombs, bones. It would be hard to find much without time. I have a complete Iron Age pot. Medieval stuff is rarer than Roman, funnily.”
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The tide is low. There is no sewage, just the gentle sound of lapping waves, a gaggle of seagulls, a cool breeze and a sense of peace. On the other shore we see stooped figures, fellow mudlarkers. A barge is chugging past, but otherwise we feel miles from the bustle of humanity.
“You can see the Thames from space, but it’s easy to forget it when you’re in the middle of London. The river at Greenwich is less gentle, more urgent and wider,” she says. In the distance we can see the Shard, near where my colleagues are working, but we could be in another country. “This is where Henry VIII had his dockyard,” she says, and immediately snaps on her gloves and finds an old navy button and a shoulder blade from a pig, possibly from the Tudor kitchens. “It’s also where Anne Boleyn sailed to the Tower of London to have her head chopped off. Everyone was employed on the river or tied to it in some way.”
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After a few minutes my heart rate has dropped and I’m absorbed in watching Maiklem methodically pick up a slim Tudor brick, then a hair pin. I can’t do mudlarking myself because permits have stopped being issued recently. “So many people got into it during lockdown that it became too crowded. In 2019 only 200 had permits to comb the Thames foreshore. By 2023 about 5,000 did, and the British Museum has been inundated with objects.”
Maiklem knows she would find more if she used a metal detector and scraped away at the surface of the riverbed, but mudlarkers see this as cheating. “I don’t like to leave any trace of myself or upset the foreshore’s fragility. A couple of years ago I found a freshly eroded 16th-century sword. It was my Excalibur moment.”
The longest she has stayed away is a month or so. “The river never gets angry. It’s patient and I feel it’s waiting for me. This is a living river of lost souls. Anyone spending time here will see bodies. The only thing the children found exciting was a 250-year-old human skull. He became known as Fred and stayed with us during lockdown. He was probably a convict waiting for transportation on a boat. They were dreadful places, lots of fights and disease. Anyone who died was buried in a shallow grave, so it’s not uncommon to find remains. You have to inform the police, but he was covered in barnacles. Now he’s at Leicester University, where they are seeing if he has any relatives.”
I can see why it’s so addictive. You’re always discovering something new. “You never get much of this stuff in museums, and you can’t touch them. Also you haven’t found it yourself. I think the river hands me stuff. I spend hours down here — everyone is in such a hurry, the river forces you to calm down. This isn’t a hobby or a vocation, it’s a lifelong attachment; the Thames to me is almost sacred.”
It must infuriate Maiklem every time there is a sewage spill and the mud becomes covered in wet wipes and worse. “The sewage is horrendous. Every generation adds something, but look at what we are adding. It will never go away, and it will break down in a harmful way. There is now mass-produced crap in the water. I’ve found hospital waste, wrist bands, colostomy bags — it’s revolting — flushed down toilets and sluices. Hearing aids, false teeth, a false eye. The mudlarkers of the future will be looking at old batteries and endless mobile phones.”
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Yet she keeps coming back. Her favourite time is winter, when her hands become numb and the grey river matches the sky. “Even at night it’s a welcoming place. It’s not frightening down here, hidden away. I feel the river is looking after me.”
A Mudlarking Year by Lara Maiklem (Bloomsbury £22). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
No new mudlarking permits are being issued, but Thames Explorer Trust is running In the Footsteps of Mudlarks guided archaeology tours along the foreshore until the end of September, £25pp for adults and children over eight; thames-explorer.org.uk/guided-tours
