“I hate water. It scares me,” says Lara Maiklem. “I just don’t go in.” We’re standing along the south bank of the Thames, across the water from St Paul’s Cathedral. The waves are lapping close to our feet among the roar of the wind and rolling shingles. It’s ironic that Maiklem, Britain’s best-known mudlark, feels this way about the Thames, but it’s the treasures the river deposits on its banks that sustain her addiction to this place. The author of the bestselling Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames, loves scouring the south bank for old and fascinating objects. “It’s my escape from everything,” she smiles. “Five or six hours staring at mud and I go home a much nicer person.”
The original ‘mudlarks’ were impoverished women, children and old people looking for rags and bone and coal to sell. Nowadays, it’s a permit-only activity for archaeology enthusiasts. When I meet Maiklem, she’s geared up in gloves and knee pads and has already found a gold button that may or may not be centuries old. Had it been chucked away on land, it would have gradually been buried over time, but the Thames does things differently: objects dating back to Roman times and beyond still appear on its shores each day. “New stuff comes in on every tide,” Maiklem explains.
It’s due to the shape of the river channel. When the 18th and 19th century Londoners needed to pull barges over the water, they flattened the Thames’ natural V-shape by filling the river bed with road sweepings, domestic and industrial waste – anything they could get their hands on – and compacted it. After the barges moved further downstream in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the river began eating away at the bed, continually pulling out centuries-old objects and scattering them, whole or fragmented, across the foreshore with each tide. It means every day is a field day for mudlarks like Maiklem. Over the last 20 years, she has plucked objects ranging from a 16th-century sword, a 14th-century crossbow bolt from the Agincourt era, opium pipes once smoked by seafarers in Wapping, and a Tudor shoe still dented with the owner’s toe prints.
“There’s nothing more personal than that. I’ve always been fascinated by the way people lived in the past, how our ancestors lived – that hands-on sense of the past.” The 53-year-old is a font of social history. Her new book, A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season, contains eye-opening insights, such as the tossing of badly counterfeited sixpence coins into the river as forgery was punishable by whipping, losing an ear or a hand, or imprisonment. Or the bullets and grenades discarded by demobilised soldiers because they were legally forbidden to keep souvenirs or live ammunition after the First World War.
The river also tells the story of London’s cosmopolitanism, then and now. “We sent England out to the world, and the world ended up here,” says Maiklem, pointing to the West Indian coral used as ballast, or the 16-17th century pipe from Turkey, brought by a merchant or sailor. The Thames holds sacred status to people of different cultures too: “It was blessed in 1971 for the Hindu community to use it like the Ganges, so we get lots and lots of Hindu offerings, as well as West African sankofa symbols and Taoist objects.”
Maiklem opens her collection box and shows me Roman coins, a piece of Roman flooring, and a fragment of a 16 or 17th-century German Bellarmine jug decorated with the image of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine’s face. As we walk along the shingle, the foreshore comes alive through her eyes. We spot a Georgian button, a horseshoe-shaped Victorian boot protector, and a chunk of Delft blue pottery from the 16th century. They’re all near the spot where she made her most sensational find: a 16th-century sword, which is now in a fridge in the Museum of London, waiting to be conserved. “It was just lying there,” Maiklem recalls. Her policy is to never use metal detectors or scrape or dig for an artefact. “If it’s on the surface, the river is ready to give up its treasures.” Digging the foreshore destabilises it, she says, and makes the river erode everything faster.
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Another of Maiklem’s most impressive discoveries was an intact 250-year-old skull, found during lockdown towards the estuary, where Australia-bound convict ships were once moored and their dead passengers buried in shallow marsh graves nearby. The Thames’ anaerobic mud preserves organic material, such as shoes and wood. “Rivers are really important for learning about the past, the everyday stuff that you don’t find in museums,” Maiklem says. “A knackered old shoe tells us more about the past and ordinary people who made London what it is today but left nothing behind apart from a buckle they broke one morning.”
It’s a contrast to today’s “plastic” generation. “Vapes are the thing at the moment,” Maiklem sighs. Over the years she has come across glass eyes, hearing aids, condoms, sanitary towels, cocaine wrappers, Santander bikes, mobile phones and – the number one enemy – non-biodegradable wet wipes. “They’ve actually created islands and are changing the geography of the Thames. This is such a patient river. It has put up with so much from us. It’s supposed to be shallow and spread out with little islands. It’s supposed to be slow-moving, not this fast-moving deep channel that we’ve created with these walls. We’ve built all around it, poisoned it, killed it and brought it back to life. Yet it just keeps flowing. It’s an eternal river.”
Nevertheless, today’s Londoners still do manage to leave some interesting stuff. Maiklem has found love letters, photographs, and wedding rings – usually found near bridges where they have been presumably dropped in anger or heartbreak. Her love and knowledge of the Thames is so infectious it makes me want to take up mudlarking. Are there any other rivers would she mudlark in? “The Seine and Tiber would be great,” she says, “but, unlike the Thames, they’re not tidal. There’s nothing like the Thames.”
It’s impossible to disagree.
A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season (Bloomsbury Circus, 2024) is out now. Find out more about Lara's work at laramaiklem.com.