Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem

Finding Treasure on the River Thames

This post is part of a series—see my page Recommended Books. To my knowledge, no shelves exist in libraries or bookshops labelled ‘Place Writing’ and these books in my opinion are good examples of the genre. I hope that one day they will gain recognition as epitomising the genre and legitimately be categorised as such.

The River Thames in London is the star of this memoir by Lara Maiklem; the book documents her mudlarking, an interest which began in 2012.

More than a Hobby

Within the first few pages, we discover that this is more than a hobby, far more than a weekender’s escapade scavenging in mudflats exposed by twice daily tides, it’s a professional obsession that has led to a deep knowledge and passion for a hidden social history of London.

The North Sea flows into the Thames changing the river’s height by up to seven meters in just six hours. Lara says: ‘I am obsessed with the incessant rise and fall of the water. For years my spare time has been controlled by the river’s ebb and flow’ (p3).

Going back in Time

‘The Thames is England’s longest archaeological landscape and thousands of the objects that fill our museums have come from its foreshore’ (p47).

On her website, Lara reports: ‘I never dig or use a metal detector and I often walk little more than a mile in 5 hours, yet I can travel 2,000 years back in time through the objects that are revealed by the tide. Prehistoric flint tools, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor shoes, Georgian wig curlers and Victorian pottery, ordinary objects left behind by the ordinary people who made London what it is today.’

Is this a book of Place Writing?

Without doubt, in my opinion this book can be categorised as Place Writing. The places recorded in this memoir, these mudflats, these exposed areas along the banks of the City’s river and its estuary, are geographically contained along the tidal reach of the Thames and can be clearly identified. A recurring feature of Place Writing, in my opinion, is that readers are able to recognise real-life locations, and perhaps even arrange to visit them one day.

There are other reasons, though, that I think this book sits easily in this genre. Lara writes in the first person and provides an evidential account of her being ‘present in place’; she is actively interested in what mudlarking has to offer as she metaphorically and literally digs for clues to the history of place. Further, Lara learns more about the people who once lived and worked and travelled in these locations because her ‘finds’ open doors to the past and prompt further research.

Lost and Found

Here it’s worth noting the byline to the book, and recognising that for every ‘find’ an item has been ‘lost’. I can imagine the heartache of dropping a much-loved piece of jewellery into the depths while crossing a bridge. I can imagine the financial ruin and frustration in losing a precious cargo of gems carefully stowed on board a ship that had travelled across stormy seas only to be caught in some freak accident after successfully reaching port. Some items would have been deliberately submerged in an effort to conceal them forever. Others, perhaps, were intended to be sunk only temporarily, to be retrieved at a later date, but then something happened to scupper that plan. And Lara tells of rubbish dumps along the banks of the river, capped off many years ago, that are now degrading through erosion, their contents being plucked daily by searching currents of water.

‘In my time on the foreshore I have found a huge 8.2 carat Sri Lankan cut garnet, an amethyst cabochon, a smoky quartz and a large aquamarine. I have beads of pearl, jet, coral, crystal and amber, but the most mysterious are the raw uncut garnets that I have so far found in four locations along the Thames. They are the shape and colour of ripe pomegranate seeds, which is how garnets got their name… At one spot in particular, there are so many that they glow deep ruby red in the mud on sunny days… In truth, only the river knows how the glowing red seeds became embedded in its skin’ (p85-6).

Not for the Faint-hearted

Like other place writers, Lara returns again and again to the same spots, discovering more each time and experiencing their seasons and changing weather conditions. But let’s not romanticise this place or the treasures it holds because mudlarking can be a dangerous occupation. You can be stranded, caught out by the tide in unpredictable weather, or you can slip and catch yourself on discarded needles and broken glass, or you can be overcome by the stench of effluent that occasionally spills from the sewers. Although the Thames is cleaner than it has been for decades, Lara says:

‘The foreshore after heavy rain can be quite repulsive. … London’s victorian sewers… simply can’t cope and they overflow into the storm drains that lead directly into the river. Each year around 7,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools of untreated waste water is discharged into the Thames.’

I don’t fancy scrabbling around in filthy stinking mud, not at any time of the year, let alone after heavy rainfall, so I’m full of admiration for present-day mudlarks and appreciate the work they do. But, historically, ‘mudlarks’ were scruffy beggar children, and scavenging for a bit of treasure that could be sold was a side hustle undertaken by the poor for centuries.

As a point of interest, especially for other Substackers who have been reading the Wolf Hall trilogy this year with Simon Halsall, Hilary Mantel uses the Thames as a narrative device, a topographical link, that holds and enfolds key locations in the story. In the last of the three books, The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell recalls that as a kid he ‘used to search for treasure in the riverine mud, and plenty treasure he found…’ Metal cap badges proved lucrative: ‘It could be a gold Becket or Christopher; a flower with enamelled petals; or a jewelled cross, with a garnet where God’s head should be’ (p483).

As ever, I look forward to chatting with you in the comments. Let me know if you’ve read this book, or listened to it, as I did, on audio.

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Notes, Credits & Links:

• Photo is mine: I borrowed this book from the Public Library.

• Lara Maiklem, Mudlarking (2019), is available in the UK via Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops. (Affiliate link.)

• For more about Lara Maiklem, see her website.

• In London, a licence is required from the Port of London Authority, it is illegal to search for or remove artefacts of any kind from the foreshore without one.

• In Simon Haisall’s Substack, Footnotes and Tangents, he guides readers through some of the world’s greatest literature. The Wolf Hall trilogy is available via Bookshop.org as a gift pack or as three separate books.

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