Scouring the shores of the Thames, Lara Maiklem uncovers pieces of the city’s forgotten past
‘All you need are wellies, a bag for finds and sunscreen. I’ll bring the latex gloves.’ Lara Maiklem’s email, sent a week before our encounter, has done its work. I arrive on the Greenwich foreshore to meet the author and amateur historian well oiled, substantially booted and slightly worried. Looking for London’s past in what Dickens described as the ‘slime and ooze’ of the Thames suddenly seems like a silly idea.
In her new book, Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames, Maiklem follows the river from its western tidal head at Teddington Lock to its arrival at the sea in the east, recounting what has been found on its fringes along the way. The book is a hybrid of personal memoir, London history and literary cabinet of curiosities. She tells of treasures – Iron Age pots, coins, garnets galore and the ‘soft butteriness’ of gold – but also bloated corpses, riverside morgues and the dreaded ‘Thames tummy’ she occasionally acquired as a result.
Still, this is Greenwich, I tell myself, where time and tide are orderly. I descend the river steps to the gentle sound of a piano breezing from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance in the Old Royal Naval College. Maiklem strides over the shingle with a beaming smile.
Some 20 years ago, she began searching this shoreline for debris from the Palace of Placentia, the birthplace of Henry VIII, which once dominated Greenwich. This place made her a mudlark – or, as the 20th-century archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume called them, ‘a something-for-nothing collector’. Her London Mudlark Facebook page has helped to popularise the pastime. And today she is offering me a masterclass.
There is something Tiggerish in Maiklem’s enthusiasm for this messy business. With a lick of vanilla-blonde hair and a rumbling Sid James laugh, she waxes lyrical about a pair of Roman castration clamps uncovered at London Bridge.We begin at the western end of the foreshore, near Cutty Sark, where remnants of a medieval jetty poke out of the shoreline like a black, snapped spine. Beyond this point is an area listed as a scheduled monument, a site of national archaeological interest, from which nothing can be removed.
But there is plenty to be found where we are. ‘This is a piece of the palace; this is from a window,’ Maiklem says, bending down next to a chunk of pale masonry. Her hands sweep across the pebbles, plucking items out of the gloop that, to me, are hardly visible. ‘This is a piece of 16th or 17th century German stoneware, so that would have been used in the palace. There are bones, there are oyster shells. That’s a Tudor brick, you can tell by how thin it is. This is where you find little things stuck to the surface, like pins and buttons.’ The river’s natural panning action sorts its bounty.
Maiklem recently found a human skull on the Thames Estuary (mudlarks are competitive and notoriously cagey about where exactly they have struck lucky). She believes it belonged to one of the inmates from the prison hulks that were moored along the estuary during the late 18th century.
‘It’s not a modern skull, you can tell it’s been in there for ages. Other bits of him were lying all over the place. We gathered up all the bones we could find and buried them in a shallow grave, marked it, took a GPS, and then the police went and dug it up.’ She was swabbed for DNA to eliminate her from investigations.
The estuary dungeons were often used as holding pens for prisoners before transportation to the colonies. During the research for her book, Maiklem discovered that one of her own ancestors had been held in them in the early 19th century before a stretch of hard labour in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).
Paola A Magni, a forensic science lecturer at Murdoch University in Perth, read about the skull on Facebook and got in contact. ‘She is, get this, a specialist in barnacle colonisation of human remains, so she’s over the moon about this,’ Maiklem says. ‘I’m trying to get the coroner to hand it over. But you know what they’re like: “Ah, computer says no.”’
Bending down, she extracts a miniscule aglet – possibly the lace-end to a bodice – from the reluctant ground, which has the consistency of cake mix. Has Thames mud changed over the centuries?
‘I don’t think so,’ she says, prodding the gunk with her finger. ‘Think about what it’s made up of; it’s made of poo.’
Maiklem grew up on a dairy farm in Surrey during the 1970s and ’80s. It was a solitary childhood – she had much older brothers – which forged a fondness for daydreaming and foraging (she would hoard sun-dried snakeskins, birds’ eggs and bottle stoppers). Things progressed fast.
‘I was 10 years old when I found my first human bone,’ she writes in Mudlarking. While picnicking with her mother in the churchyard of Southwark Cathedral, Maiklem found part of a skeleton among the roses. It was, she recalls in the book, ‘a perfect end to a perfect day’.
She hated history at school. ‘It was boring,’ she says. ‘Facts and dates, kings and queens. I want to know about ordinary people who I can relate to. The people who lived in my house, the people I descended from. How they survived, what they used, how they lived. The forgotten people. That’s history for me.’
After studying sociology and social anthropology at Newcastle University, Maiklem moved to London. An editor of illustrated reference books, she worked for years at Dorling Kindersley and now takes freelance publishing projects. It is a role – like being a mudlark – that requires general knowledge and a visual instinct. A few years ago she edited the Kiss Monster book – touted as the largest rock book ever published – a 3ft-high tome dedicated to Kiss, the American band notorious for their wild antics and even wilder make-up. ‘I ended up going on tour with them. It was bonkers.’
Maiklem began her river life as a walker. Having gone ‘party crazy’ during the 1990s, she found respite on its banks when she moved from Hackney to Greenwich. ‘I missed the farm and looked everywhere for somewhere nice and quiet.’
Gradually, she realised that she was walking on the city’s flotsam and jetsam. ‘Like lots of people in London, for some reason I didn’t know I could get down here,’ she says. ‘It took me a while to realise [the river] went up and down.’ In her book, she explains that the tide is the mudlark’s metronome, but people can easily get stranded on isolated patches of the foreshore known as ‘pinch points’ if they miss its beat.
Mudlarking helped her through the death of her father and the breakup of a relationship. Subsequently, it smoothed her way into marriage and parenthood. Sarah, Maiklem’s wife – a ‘foreshore widow’ – does not share her passion (‘She just stands there saying, “Can we go now?”’). And their children are too young to join in. Moving out of London has meant that trips to the Thames, like today’s, are cherished.
Turning east, Maiklem guides me towards the jetty of Greenwich Power Station, which looms overhead like a creature from The War of the Worlds. Under its grey legs is a ridge of animal bones, the remnants of Tudor feasts. ‘The police get calls all the time from worried people who think they’ve discovered a massacre.’
Somewhere in this morbid landscape she spots a clay pipe bowl from the mid-1700s. She challenges me to find it. Mudlarks call this ‘getting your eye in’. The key, I’m told, is to relax your gaze and let anomalies pop out – anything straight or round, handmade rather than organic. And there it is: a smooth cone in a pile of rough lines.
She picks up another item and holds it out to me. In her hand is a sickle of bone and teeth. I flinch. ‘You are a delicate flower,’ she chortles. ‘It’s a sheep’s jawbone. Lovely colours.’
Bagging my pipe bowl – swiftly complemented by a tiny white Roman tessera conspicuous by its geometry – we leave the shore and go for lunch at the Trafalgar Tavern. This landmark building was immortalised by Dickens in Our Mutual Friend. Victorian diners would throw coins from its windows to children waiting in the mud below. Today it is a homogenised family pub. But it still serves whitebait, which we take out on to the terrace.
Maiklem produces a selection of her favourite finds from her backpack and spreads them over the table: a child’s shoe similar to those found on the wreck of the Mary Rose, a 12th-century Celtic buckle plate, a Georgian wig curler.
Peering up at us from the centre of this smorgasbord is a turn-of-the-century glass eye with a hand-blown, finely feathered green iris.
It is, she explains, the anticipation of the find that provides the thrill, rather than the discovery. Her searches are bookended by scouring maps – stairs to the water and large riverside houses are sites of interest – and researching discoveries (often with the help of the Museum of London).
Her objects are then pigeonholed in an ink-stained printer’s chest at home in Kent. She is particular about what she keeps: ‘I want to move at some point.’ Sometimes mudlarks swap items of interest and choice pieces are often gifted or sold to institutions (Maiklem donated a gold Tudor lace-end to the Museum of London). Her first extraordinary discovery, she recalls, was a 16th-century clay pipe shaped like a cockerel – ‘He was missing his beak’ – and was possibly a children’s toy called a ‘cockshy’.
‘Don’t ever try googling that,’ she warns me. ‘You get something else.’ It’s just one inscrutable word in a whole lexicon of mysterious terms she retrieves with relish. She resurrects ‘jettons’ (coin-like tokens), ‘lumpers’ (cargo dockers) and ‘toshers’ (sewer hunters).
Mudlarking is not a hobby for the faint-hearted. The river can throw up some unpleasant surprises (false teeth, cannulas, colostomy bags and two fresh corpses all bob up in Maiklem’s book). What, I ask, has been the worst?
‘Fatberg,’ she says without hesitation. ‘I’ve never smelt anything like it. Horrific.’ She occasionally finds rancid ‘yellow-grey blobs’ of fat and other matter ‘lurking inconspicuously among the gravel after a sewage spill’.
A chapter in the book on the marshes and beaches of Tilbury is particularly bracing. ‘I want to put people off going there because it’s dangerous,’ she says. ‘There’s a difference between a bit of sewage and bit of arsenic and asbestos.’
There is no such thing as a typical mudlark, Maiklem maintains, but a love of one’s own company is a prerequisite. It is a realm for magpies and obsessives. ‘There is the Society for Clay Pipe Research. They have a conference once a year,’ she chuckles. ‘I consider myself quite normal compared to most of the people I have met.’
A large cast of historical Thames eccentrics appear in Mudlarking. The most famous is TJ Cobden-Sandersen, an Edwardian printer who sprinkled half a million pieces of metal type off Hammersmith Bridge (he didn’t want the font of his Doves Press used for publications unworthy of the Lord). Maiklem pulled the only comma to have been salvaged from the river, and the epigraphs to her chapters are all set in the font.
Maiklem calls the Thames the ‘home of mudlarking’ as it has 2,000 years of history and the tidal movement means there is a constant ebb and flow of things to find. And it still has its fair share of rogues and chancers. ‘There are people who abuse the foreshore, who take things they shouldn’t take,’ Maiklem says, acknowledging that regulation is necessary. There is a two-tier system of mudlarking permits, one for surface finds and another for deep digging. The latter is restricted to members of the Thames Mudlark Society, of which Maiklem is not a part.
There are about 50 members of the society but probably hundreds who search using a standard permit. There were hardly any female mudlarks when she started, she says, likening it to the male-dominated clique in the BBC metal-detecting comedy Detectorists. But things are changing. ‘There is a hardcore of mudlarks who want to keep it to themselves; they don’t want to share their toys. But it’s our shared history, it doesn’t belong to any one group of people.’
When she began posting online many readers thought London Mudlark was a man, an assumption shattered when her book was announced. ‘One woman said, “You’ve broken my heart. I had this vision of you. You were a young, strapping archaeologist with a beard.”’
As Maiklem packs up her precious objects, I’m curious to know if there is a danger of missing out on the present by being immersed in the past. ‘No. The moment you come off the foreshore you’re thrown back into the 21st century. And in London it’s a big wham!’ But she always returns. ‘Once you realise what’s here you get obsessed with it… Because you never know what you’re going to find. Every day it’s a different treasure hunt.’
Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is published on 22 August. To pre-order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844-871 1514