The joys of mudlarking

Spectator

16-07-2025

Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past. What would they find? A rusted Lime bike, a message in a takeaway soy sauce bottle? 'Vapes,' says Kate Sumnall, curator of the Secrets of the Thames exhibition at the London Museum Docklands. 'Lots of vapes.'
Mudlarking – the practice of scavenging at low tide for washed-up historical treasures, oddities or mundane objects – has become a well-gatekept hobby over the past five years. More than 10,000 people are now on the waiting list for mudlarking permits. Of course, anyone can go down to the foreshore to look around and turn pebbles over with their shoe, but even if you flout the rules, mudlarking is no longer the grubby, lawless enterprise it used to be.
The first mudlarks were criminals, but quite pathetic ones. Writing in 1796, the founder of the Thames River Police called them 'the lowest cast of thieves'. They rode the coat-tails of more daring plunderers who looted the coal-barges and ships carrying sugar, rum and spices from the West Indies. Mudlarks would wade in the shallows and pick up bags of stolen goods tossed overboard, which they transported to land. Some poked around with sticks looking for bits of coal, but mostly they found scraps of rope, bones, rags and broken glass which sold for next to nothing.
The Victorian anthropologist James Greenwood classed the mudlarks he saw as 'gaunt, old-fashioned children', 'stalwart, brawny men' and 'tottering old women': 'each may be seen daily battling with the rising river for a crust'. The women were often eccentrics or drunks, dressed in rags and disappearing without a trace. A police report in 1841 describes the arrest of Katharine Macarthy, 'the dread of the Thames-police', who, on multiple occasions, 'embraced the officers like a bear, and, after half smothering them, has left them as muddy as herself'. These descriptions form a sharp contrast with the Rab jackets and Toast jumpers down on the foreshore today.
In the mid-19th century, a pair of mudlarks capitalised on the Romantic fascination with the past. Billy Smith and Charley Eaton created somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 forgeries inspired by real artefacts, which they sold to museums and private collectors. Secrets of the Thames displays a trio of 'Billys and Charleys': a statuette of a king of mysterious origin; Jonah in a skeletal whale; and a Roman medallion with a nonsensical inscription (Billy and Charley were illiterate). These forgeries, aged in acid and stained with mud, have become artefacts in their own right. There's something cartoony and slightly impish about them. I get the sense that their makers had a grand old time cheating suckers.
The most common items you'll discover on the foreshore are what appear to be clay cigarette butts. These are the broken stems of tobacco pipes, used once and then tossed from the old pubs along the river. Some were re-purposed for curling wigs, for enemas and tracheotomies, as catheters, for stabbing or for loading into pistols (one of Queen Victoria's would-be assassins tried to kill her with a pistol loaded with pipe fragments).
While finds such as these help us piece together a richer image of what everyday life was like in the past, they also give the impression that the Thames has always been a bit of a rubbish dump. The Romans built the city's first sewers, which ultimately discharged into the river and its tributaries. In medieval London, a public toilet was built over Queenhithe dock to be 'flushed by the Thames'. The Great Stink of 1858 was a problem centuries in the making. The summer heat turned the polluted river into a gutter of viscous sludge – what Benjamin Disraeli, then chancellor, called 'a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors'. Today, you can still find the bones, teeth and hooves of butchered animals whose carcasses were dumped in the river until the late 19th century.
You couldn't pay me to swim in it, but the Thames has also long been considered a holy place. Statues of Roman gods and goddesses are found on the foreshore – some merely lost or discarded, others thrown into the river as deliberate offerings. Rosary beads often turn up; one in the museum is a striking memento mori, a skull on one side and a beautiful woman's face on the other. Our forebears saw the river as a threshold between life and death: a destructive force of flooding, drowning and disease, but also a place where people were baptised and reborn as Christians. It's the river where Stanley Spencer depicted Christ preaching at the Cookham regatta, and where Francis Thompson imagined 'Christ walking on the water,/ Not of Genesareth, but Thames!'
Little pewter pilgrim badges depicting the martyr St Thomas Becket are frequently unearthed by mudlarks. It's not certain, but this suggests a religious tradition of tossing them into the Thames on returning from a pilgrimage to Canterbury. One badge in the museum is shaped like a peacock, now missing the figure of Becket riding it, perhaps symbolising the immortality of his soul in heaven as the peacock's flesh was thought to be incorruptible. Around 500 years later, someone else has thrown a peacock into the river. This time it's a small statue, a Hindu offering, perhaps from some time after Yogiji Maharaj blessed the Thames as a sacred river in 1970.
Spectacle frames c.1600. © LONDON MUSEUM
It doesn't take much time on the foreshore to understand why people have viewed the river as a sacred place. Down at Queenhithe, I listened as a tinny recording of 'Baby Shark' travelled across the water from Bankside. The sounds of wheelie suitcases being dragged across the Millennium Bridge occasionally gave the sense of camping out beneath an overpass. But there was still a solemnity to being there beneath the city. On a sunny day, the ripples of light on the water have a mesmerising beauty. The Thames Clippers occasionally send gentle waves against the remains of the timber boatyards and churn up the mud, loosening whatever has been lodged there for who knows how long. It is perfectly ordinary to pick up a piece of green-glazed medieval pottery that no other human has seen for centuries.
I ask Sumnall, besides vapes, what traces will be left of our time? Troves of little keys, she says. But 'it's not the key that's the significant thing': it's the love-lock it belonged to. These locks are periodically cut off bridges and disposed of, perhaps melted down for sheet metal, leaving our descendants without a crucial piece of the puzzle.
It would be a mawkish legacy, but we do and say many mawkish things in private. Thinking about my love life coming under the scrutiny of future archaeologists would make me seize up with humiliation. There are several gold rings in the exhibition, engraved with the messages 'for love I am given', 'have my heart' and 'none other'. The words are hardly anything more than the sayings on candy Sweethearts, but they weren't meant for my eyes. Each ring was laden with feeling to the person who gave it, who had it rejected, who chucked it into the river with a broken heart or to cope with grief – or who drowned with it.
One thing is notably missing from Secrets of the Thames: human remains. The intention of the Docklands exhibition, Sumnall tells me, is to fascinate. It's one thing to use the human body – a real human's body – to edify, but another entirely to entertain.
Nonetheless, 'if you don't find anything else, you will find bones', one mudlark tells me. For me, it was deeply unnerving, casting about all those decayed bones on the foreshore. At first glance, they could be driftwood, battered and smoothed by the river. Some are brown, some blackened, but they're unmistakably bones. Though most belonged to animals, you feel you never quite know. Secrets of the Thames left me thinking about how little humans change, how familiar and, well, human the people in the past seem. But with my modern naivety and squeamishness about death, I suspect they'd find me rather strange.