“The Thames is especially rich in small portable finds it’s not only their quantity but their quality that makes Thames finds so important. “It is tremendously important that mudlarks report their finds to the Portable Antiquities Scheme in accordance with the terms of their licence, no matter how trivial or mundane they seem,” said Stuart Wyatt, Finds Liaison Officer for the London area, who assesses and records the artefacts found by mudlarks for the PAS. I found my first object that day, a short piece of clay pipe stem, and I was hooked.” “For some reason, until then, I'd thought of the foreshore as a forbidden space, sometimes revealed, other times covered over with water. “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. 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. While these tours are a great introduction to communal mudlarking, most mudlarks are solitary creatures and can often be found on their own, staring at the stones beneath their feet. The Thames Discovery Programme, a group of historians and volunteers, run guided tours of the foreshore where “expert guide will point out fascinating archaeology hiding in plain sight like Saxon fish traps and jetties that once led to Tudor palaces… and that you stay safe and stick to Port of London Authority rules,” said Josh Frost, senior community archaeologist with Thames Discovery. It has never been easier for people to explore the Thames: anyone looking for inspiration just has to follow the mudlarking hashtags on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. In addition, the mud of the Thames is anaerobic – having very low levels of oxygen – so is perfect for preserving organic material that would otherwise rot.ĭespite its humble origins, mudlarking is undergoing a renaissance. Mudlarks were a chiefly London phenomenon because few port cities had as large, exposed riverbanks where they could descend to do their work. At this time, the banks of the river would have swarmed with the melancholy figures of mudlarks, mostly poor women and children who would be “up with the larks” to work whenever the river ran low.Īs the tide dropped, they would wade into the mud to grab lumps of coal, pieces of rope or anything else careless boatmen had dropped overboard that they could sell. The terms came about in the Georgian and Victorian periods when the Thames was one of the major routes to transport goods into the city. Historically, being a mudlark was not a desirable station in life. Walking along the foreshore of the Thames in central London is not everyone’s idea of a hobby – it can be cold, dirty and just as muddy as mudlarking suggests.
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