BBC ARTICLE ON LONDON'S MUDLARKS

The name “mudlarks” originated in the Georgian and Victorian periods

One of the surprise best-selling books of 2019 was Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames by Lara Maiklem, who stumbled into mudlarking almost by accident. “One day I found myself at the top of one of the river stairs looking down onto the foreshore and I decided to go down,” she wrote. “For some reason, until then, I'd thought of the foreshore as a forbidden space, sometimes revealed, other times covered over with water. I found my first object that day, a short piece of clay pipe stem, and I was hooked.”

The Thames is one of the greatest and largest archaeological sites in the world, and the entire history of Britain can be told from items found on the foreshore. Many objects in the Museum of London have labels giving their provenance as “Discovered in the Thames”. Even a cursory glance at the river will reveal broken pottery pieces, shards of glass and twisted pieces of metal, and mudlarks have discovered everything from woolly mammoth teeth to Roman lamps to Tudor rings.

“The Thames is especially rich in small portable finds; it's not only their quantity but their quality that makes Thames finds so important. The preservation of lead, leather and bone artefacts is especially good, whether a Roman bone hair pin or a 17th-Century child's pewter toy. These artefacts are often lost on land sites due to adverse soil environments, but the anaerobic qualities of the Thames foreshore preserve them.”

However, mudlarking can be a risky hobby. When the tide turns, it turns fast. You must always be aware of your route off of the foreshore. The mud is another hazard: on one of my first mudlarking trips, a more experienced mudlark told me how he had once fallen into a pit left in the mud. He was lucky to have a bucket to claw his way out – though the Tube ride home was a little dirty.

But it's the mud of the Thames that makes mudlarking so rewarding. The layers of dirt contain artefacts from every stage of London's history and pre-history. Liz Anderson, a mudlark who runs a blog about her finds, once pulled a 2,000-year-old Roman nit comb from the mud. “The comb is made of boxwood and what I love about it is that it's almost exactly the same design as these things still are today,” she told me. “It also has mud between the teeth, in which almost certainly there may still lurk Roman nits. When I found it, it was in such good condition it looked like it had only been dropped yesterday.”

To read the complete article, see:
The Lost Treasures of London's Thames (http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200729-the-lost-treasures-of-londons-river-thames)

To read earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
COINS FOUND MUDLARKING ON THE THAMES (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n06a13.html)
MUDLARKING AND METAL DETECTING FINDS : Tallow Chandler Token (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n13a25.html)
NOTES FROM E-SYLUM READERS: JULY 26, 2020 : Trade Token Mudlark Find (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n30a12.html)

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