On the banks of the Thames, 2,000 years of history

“It’s chaos here,” says Lara Maiklem, as we meet amid a beery scrum outside The Banker pub on a hot afternoon on the north bank of the Thames. “But we’ll go down there and it’s another world.”

She leads the way, dodging around the boozers and descending a steep set of steps on to the river’s foreshore. We’re just five minutes from the FT’s London office, within earshot of the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral, but Maiklem — known on social media as “The London Mudlark” — has agreed to give me a City tour with a difference. 

For hundreds of years, impoverished Londoners scoured the banks of the Thames looking for items to sell — but today “mudlarking” (the term first appeared in print in the 18th century) is increasingly popular with hobbyists and history buffs.

Maiklem’s upcoming book A Mudlarking Year recounts her obsessive interest in treasure-hunting along the river, through all seasons and weathers, and the artefacts she’s uncovered: a 16th-century sword (“my Excalibur moment”), a c15th-century pilgrim badge, leather shoes, bone buttons — and of course countless pieces of Anthropocene plastic. The Thames might look flat “greige” from the banks and bridges but beneath the surface it’s a thick minestrone of human detritus.

“I’m going to pick up a timeline of pottery that will take us back 2,000 years within a few steps,” she says, as we set off eastwards, skirting under the dripping girders of Cannon Street Railway Bridge. Almost immediately, the city starts to feel skewed and at one remove. Red double-decker buses glide by at sky level. Pairs of disembodied legs dangle over the high-walled bank. London’s roar is muffled.

Only minutes later, Maiklem has her hands full: she shows me a delicate fragment of 18th-century blue-patterned Chinese porcelain, a piece of medieval pottery — glossy still, and a rich earthy green from copper and lead that was added to the slip — and some coarse Roman blackware, “from a cooking pot or serving pot”, made from clay out in the estuary and brought into town. 

“This is Londinium,” Maiklem says. “This is where London was founded, so on this part of the foreshore you’ll find a bigger range of objects than anywhere else.”

Anywhere else in the world, she might have added. There are mudlarkers who forage along canals in the Netherlands, and some who look for early 20th-century items at Dead Horse Bay off Brooklyn, but there’s nowhere with quite the Thames’ history or accessibility — neither the Seine in its Paris stretch nor the Tiber as it flows through Rome are tidal.

We crunch onwards across a shingle of animal bones and oyster shells — the remnants of centuries of suppers, Maiklem says — and look across the river to the spot where Samuel Pepys stood and witnessed people desperately trying to save their goods and belongings by “flinging them into the river, or bringing them into lighters [small boats]” as the Great Fire of 1666 raged through the city.

It was in this section, too, that the Frost Fairs of the Little Ice Age took place: “The most solid ice would have been here,” Maiklem explains, because the river’s flow was slowed by Old London Bridge. “[So] this is where they would’ve raced horses, roasted oxen and dropped loads of stuff into the slush that obviously then just fell into the river.”

The amount of sewage is more than I’ve ever seen . . . and anything that fits down a toilet ends up in the water as well’

The tide is now at its lowest and we navigate our way through a small gully, rocks slick with weed, aiming for a line of revetments (structural defences) at the water’s edge. “I always say: be aware that anything brown or green will be slippery,” says Maiklem.

I pick my route gingerly and try not to think about the brown. Today there’s no visible trace of sewage; the river smells pleasantly of the sea. But in the past few months the squalid condition of Britain’s waterways has barely been out of the news. Earlier in the year it was revealed that Thames Water was responsible for 6,590 hours of sewage spills into the Thames during the last nine months of 2023. In March, participants in the Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race were warned about dangerously high levels of E.coli bacteria in the river. 

It’s a problem that’s not without precedent. In the hot summer of 1858, London was gripped by the Great Stink, when the reek of effluent cleared the Palace of Westminster and galvanised support for Joseph Bazalgette’s designs for a new sewage system. Today, Bazalgette’s outdated engineering, compounded by water companies’ mismanagement and more frequent heavy rainfall, means the system is often overwhelmed.

“The amount of sewage going in now is more than I’ve ever seen,” Maiklem says. “There’s a huge outflow just beyond Tower Bridge, there’s a huge one in Greenwich . . . and obviously anything that fits down a toilet will end up in the water as well.” She’s found hospital waste and syringes, false eyes and toothbrushes, and has stood on top of a spongy iceberg of wet wipes.

As Maiklem snaps on a pair of black rubber gloves, I feel some relief at having been forbidden from getting my own hands dirty. The Port of London Authority imposes stringent rules: the public is allowed to walk on the foreshore but not to search it; aspirant mudlarkers must apply for a permit.

After a few minutes of combing and sifting (Maiklem refuses to dig, as it can contribute to the erosion of the river bank) she spots a 17th-century lead cloth seal. “It was basically to prove that it’s good-quality cloth and the tax has been paid . . . [but] the great thing about this, can you see the pattern?” She wipes away a smear of mud to reveal a faint imprint of the fabric it once held. “I find quite a lot of these, and I think it’s because the dyers were working up here.” We turn to retrace our steps as wash from a passing river cruiser hits the revetments with a flatulent volley, and crashes up the beach towards our shoes.  

Because the mud’s anaerobic, it preserves everything . . . it’s almost as if they were dropped yesterday’

You only need to glance at the main channel of the river, a churn of shape-shifting eddies, to be reminded of how perilous the Thames can be. In her book, Maiklem describes watching “an unmistakable form float slowly past me on an ebb tide” — just one of the roughly 35 bodies that are picked up every year by the Marine Policing Unit — and the police boat that arrived shortly afterwards to start the grim process of retrieval and identification. 

By now, we’ve passed our starting point and we’re standing in front of the slimy seepage from an enormous manhole cover: the last vestiges of the Walbrook, one of the lost tributaries of the Thames. “The Romans could get a ship up here,” Maiklem says. We’ve found yet more evidence of London’s Roman past in the form of a 2,000-year-old bone hairpin, snapped at one end and around two inches long. “Whether there was a workshop making them close by, and this is waste, or there was a bathhouse nearby and they trickled down the drain, nobody knows, but this is really nice.” 

It’s easy to get swept along with Maiklem’s enthusiasm. We chance upon several fragments of a clay pipe stem and bowl (one within a few metres of a discarded vape), and she pulls some other examples out of her bag so we can compare. “That’s 18th-century, and that’s 17th-century,” she says, pointing to the smaller of the two, made when tobacco was less affordable. She’s found some with teeth marks around the stem, and has even collected enough tiny fronds of tobacco set within the plug of mud at the bottom of some bowls so that she could light it up and for a few seconds be transported back to the fug of London’s early modern taverns. “It’s incredible down here because the mud’s anaerobic, it preserves everything . . . it’s almost as if they were dropped yesterday.”

As I climb back up the steps to modern London, I’m reminded of Hilary Mantel’s description of history being “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it” and half wonder if she had the Thames in mind. This river is a gateway to both our present and our past, and mudlarking along its foreshore might just be the closest you can get to time travel. 

Laura Battle is the FT’s deputy books editor
‘A Mudlarking Year’ is published by Bloomsbury on July 4

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