This book slowly and beautifully details a year of mudlarking along the foreshores of the River Thames. Maiklem has written two earlier books about mudlarking and has spent 20 years collecting the detritus of history at low tide along that river.
This book covers 12 months from 1 January, 2022, to the last day of that year, spanning the seasons from winter to winter. Appealing to the bowerbird in us, the end papers of this hardback book feature photographs from each month of some of her finds.
Described as the gentle art of looking, mudlarking has become popular. In 2018 there were only about 200 people with mudlarking permits from the Port of London Authority, but by 2022 there were 5000. The PLA for two years renewed only old permits, ‘to protect the integrity of the Thames foreshore’, but in 2024 is taking applications again.
Maiklem’s ‘treasures’ found included Georgian wig curlers, clay pipes, medieval pilgrim tokens, Tudor love tokens, and even a 16th century short sword. Her descriptions of the river, in all kinds of weather, are lyrical.
She describes the river as an obsessive sorter, dividing up its booty by size and weight, scattering bones higher up, piling roof tiles in humps, and dropping small metal objects in barely perceivable dips closer to the waterline.
When it rains, London’s Victorian sewers, built to serve seven million fewer people, cannot cope, and they overflow into the storm drains leading to the river, giving it what she terms ‘a foul breath’. Read this book slowly, savouring every word, and you will be by the Thames at low tide.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am a mudlark. I wander the shores of the River Thames at low tide searching for lost and forgotten objects that tell tales of the past and bring forgotten Londoners to life.
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.
I grew up on a dairy farm in Surrey and moved to London in the early 1990s. For several years the river was my go-to place in the chaos of the city, then one day I found myself at the top of a set of old wooden river stairs, looking down onto the foreshore itself. That was 20 years ago, since then it has become my obsession; a weekly amble in central London, lost in the minutiae of my surroundings, or a bracing march further east through the bleak marshes of the Estuary.
In 2012, I became the first person to share mudlarking with the world on social media as ‘The London Mudlark’. What began as an anonymous time filler between feeding, burping and changing baby twins quickly attracted followers and media attention and I have now written four books – the Sunday Times bestseller Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames and A Field Guide to Larking: Beachcombing, Mudlarking, Fieldwalking and More, Looking for Treasure and A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season. In 2022 I was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (founded 1707) in recognition of my work in increasing public knowledge of mudlarking and Thames-found antiquities. In 2023 I was made an Associate Brother of the Art Worker’s Guild, I am also the first woman in history to hold the ancient position of Juror for the Court Leet of the King’s Borough in Southwark and in 2024 I was asked to be a trustee for the Thames Renaissance Westminster Commission.
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