(Her book, Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames, came out in late 2019.) I often get asked if I can take keen beginners out mudlarking with me but unfortunately I’m not able to unless they’re in possession of a standard permit. It’s grayish brown, and it’s about to make a move on our shoes. Household trash, too, wound up here because it was lost or dumped or shoveled in. Follow us on social media to add even more wonder to your day. “Anything brown or green is slippery,” Maiklem calls out. Wishing you enjoyable and safe mudlarking! Also widely scattered about are fragments of pottery from various centuries—small shards in the shadow of the Shard. But the majority of the things salvaged from the mud are more recent—often medieval or later—and are small, humble reminders of what people used, maybe loved, and eventually discarded. He reported that “mudlarks” had earned that moniker because they were often compelled, “in order to obtain the articles they seek, to wade sometimes up to their middle through the mud left on the shore by the retiring tide.” The river left its mark on them, Mayhew continued: “Their bodies are grimed with the foul soil of the river, and their torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.”. How might we think about the layers of “ordinary” objects swilling around right now in the Thames, the dress hooks or trade tokens or drinking vessels used and exchanged by the individuals who are the focus of this project? But back in centuries past, mudlarking was a profession, of sorts, for some of the city’s destitute, who wandered around the festering, open sewer of the Thames in search of bits of coal, rags, copper nails, and anything else they could sell to survive. Fees for 2020 . Shells and flint and rocks clink underfoot. There are also areas of Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM) eg Queenhithe, Burrells Wharf, Palace of Westminster and Tower of London, I often get asked if I can take keen beginners out mudlarking with me but unfortunately I’m not able to unless they’re in possession of a standard permit. FLO contact details. I like to buy these little guides to the tides, available online from Amazon or good bookstores, showing high and low tides throughout the year. Poking at packed-down garbage can make the shore porous and unsteady. Pins and clay pipes are often quite discernible, too. Get new content delivered directly to your inbox. Pottery is easy to spot because of its color and curves. We were rightly warned to be careful of modern sewage items—things flushed down the toilet; but the early modern privy and, for instance, the sewer infrastructure of sixteenth-century Southwark are areas of historical fascination (hopefully not just for me!). To decode your sherds, look for distinctive glazes or patterns, which, with a little research, might point to specific eras. To the untrained eye, the experience also tests value judgements and aesthetic principles. Maiklem reminded me that it’s not possible to scoop up everything you see, and you wouldn’t want to anyway. Every weekday we compile our most wondrous stories and deliver them straight to you. Mudlarking in the Thames, Part 1: An Immediate Reflection. Old wooden or metal posts, and the dips and hollows that surround them, are a good place to hunt, too, since small items such as coins can get stuck there. Be sure you can get to them before the water does. Offer available only in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico). Also be aware of pinch points on certain parts of the Thames Foreshore where the tide can come in faster than expected and risk cutting you off. Mudlarks on the Thames are always racing the tide. When the Thames dries up, amid the doomsday chaos, alongside bottle caps and seaweed what diverse debris from the early modern everyday will we recover—and what should we be looking for in the meantime? In a way, I felt responsible for the bits of pottery I had found, as the first person to touch them in hundreds of years. “Metal attracts metal, and the river washes everything of similar size and weight together,” Maiklem says. No purchase necessary. Today, London’s Thames affords the mudlarkers on its banks a similar, less apocalyptic, vision. Erosion is generally good for mudlarks, but it’s bad for the structural integrity of the city’s riverside. Fees. Thanks to the Thames Discovery Programme, we went on a guided mudlarking expedition today in the area that Elizabethans would have known as Broken Wharf. On this day, a prize find is the narrow, well-preserved sole of a shoe, with clipped angles that suggest pinching and maybe blisters—as well as the sight of a person clomping around gas-lit London hundreds of years ago. If you’re not a permit holder, but would like to learn more about the history and archaeology of the London foreshore, I heartily recommend the, There are many online resources for new mudlarks to learn their craft and help identify finds: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (#mudlark) plus some excellent YouTube videos showing experienced larkers searching for and talking about their finds. The PLA is not currently issuing any new ‘mudlark permits’. Some of the more striking ceramic artefacts were the common borderware from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, whose vivid green sheen caught the eye more than equally functional Victorian pottery or twentieth century China (or plastic margerine lids). Mudlarks have a few unwritten rules, also. Ones with round holes were affixed before the Great Fire, Maiklem writes, and the ones with square, triangular, or diamond-shaped holes were added after. We’d found four of these within minutes of descending the stairs underneath the Millennium Bridge: the expanse is littered chiefly with the stems of the pipes, ranging from bone thin to more solid, rudimentary constructions. There’s plenty of space on the shore, and no one wants to argue over who found what. The Mudlarking Statue, Portsmouth, Hampshire A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud for items of value, a term used especially to describe those who scavenged this way in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries. You’ve got to train your eye. “There’s plenty lying on the surface, and I think we should be focused on picking up what’s about to wash away,” Maiklem says. Consult a tide chart, and leave yourself enough time to explore. Finally, it’s the responsibility of all mudlarks to take any discoveries over three hundred years old to the Finds Liaison Officer (FLO) at the Museum of London for verification and logging with the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS. Atlas Obscura and our trusted partners use technology such as cookies on our website to personalise ads, support social media features, and analyse our traffic. It goes without saying you’ll need to check the tide times. Among the rocks and detritus are also a number of the bowls that form the end of the pipes. © 2020 Atlas Obscura. A beginner's guide to admiring stars, planets, and satellites—no mountaintop or fancy gear required. There's no social distance between you and your face mites. In the second chapter of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, the novel’s elusive journalist imagines what would be discovered when Istanbul’s Bosphorus dries up: “Amid the doomsday chaos, among toppled wrecks of old City Line ferries, will stretch vast fields of bottle caps and seaweed. See. Nineteenth-century journalist Henry Mayhew discussed mudlarks (along with rat-catchers, sewer flushers, and other other people whose plights were overlooked by most reporters) in his multivolume London Labour and the London Poor, first published in 1851. There were times I panicked a little and wanted grab everything I saw. ‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song’ (Edmund Spenser, 1596). Allowing more water to seep in can hasten erosion, which “is dreadful at the moment,” Maiklem says. They’re fine in slush, but I don’t know how they’ll handle a rising river. It's a long shot—but if you're keen to look, here's how to start. There’s a lot to see and no time to waste, because the water is coming. Consider supporting our work by becoming a member for as little as $5 a month. Follow us on Twitter to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders. They occasionally come across finds that date all the way back to Londinium, the era of Roman settlement, and some very old, spectacularly remarkable finds, such as Bronze Age swords and a bent dagger, were recently on view at the Secret Rivers exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands. Mudlarking is an opportunity to touch the past, but just a sliver of it—accepting that no one is ever able to know it all. She’s part of a tradition that spans centuries. The Standard permit is sufficient for most uses with the more advanced Mudlark permit only issued to members of the Thames Mudlark Society. Offer subject to change without notice. The shore is full of intriguing bits and bobs, and there’s a certain urgency, knowing that the water will be back soon, and that anything you don’t pick up is likely to be washed away. At an archaeological site, stratigraphy and context are critical: Each layer and the things around it tell a story. Finally, it’s the responsibility of all mudlarks to take any discoveries over three hundred years old to the Finds Liaison Officer (FLO) at the Museum of London for verification and logging with the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS.) Mudlarks are also required to report anything of archaeological value—including anything that qualifies as “treasure,” such as objects that contain at least 10 percent precious metal by weight and are a minimum of 300 years old—to the Portable Antiquities Scheme officer at the Museum of London. Queenhithe Dock is a rectangular inlet in the modern waterfront of the River Thames. This rule is in place because digging into the foreshore can be dicey. I want to look at everything, but the water won’t wait for indiscriminate curiosity. Lara Maiklem is getting out ahead of me, sure-footed on the slick foreshore of the River Thames, the part that is exposed when the tide goes out. Like an archive, the river and its holdings are curated and preserved and contain centuries of labour. It was a surprising vision of a river teeming with layers of history, and it prompted a reminder of the serendipity of historical investigation and the accidental gifts of an archive like the Thames.

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