Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem

I'm always on the look-out for readable, fun, but informative, non-fiction books to read. I was lucky last year and found quite a few, some of which I featured in my Best Non-fiction of 2023 post. I say 'lucky' but I put a lot of effort in finding just the right books that will keep me reading day after day and not bore me to tears. So far this month I've read three non-fiction books and it was when I got to the third one that I found my first 'gem'. 

 

Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames by Lara Maiklem is the author's debut book, first published in 2019. There was a bit of hype about it, I seem to recall. I saw articles on TV, thought it sounded like my kind of quirky read, and made a mental note to read it at some stage: here I am in 2024 just getting to it. Better late than never but also I'm a great believer in the idea that the appropriate book will find you when the time is right to read it. 

Lara Maiklem is not actually a born and bred Londoner, she was a farm girl drawn to London, as many people are, by the idea of the bright lights and possibilities of city life. It was years before she discovered the river, but once she did and started to see that there were things on the foreshore, washed up or stuck in the mud, that these things were often historical in nature and that the collecting of them is known as 'Mudlarking', she has not looked back.

A lot of people apparently do not know that The Thames is a tidal river. I'm not sure I did until I was in my forties and started to go to London occasionally, before that I had not given the matter any thought. The tidal head of the river is at Teddington apparently and it's also the limit of the Thames Waterman license, which is one of those iconic occupations that seems to belong to the world of Charles Dickens. In fact, mudlarking has been going on since then when it was urchins who were scouring the foreshore, looking for things to sell so they could eat. These days it's a hobby, but you need a license and that's not easy to get as the amount of people wanting to do it have rocketed and the the authorities have had to cap the numbers.

We're told that mudlarkers tend to fall into two categories, Hunters and Gatherers. By and large, men do the former, women the latter. Women stroll along the foreshore picking up what they see, men come armed with metal detectors and shovels and start digging, (although you're only allowed to dig to a certain depth: the rules are very strict). For some reason this amused me and rang true. (And reminded me of The Accidental Detectorist by Nigel Richardson, another gem of a book.)

Maiklem organises her book into chapters headed with areas of London that are on the river - Hammersmith, Vauxhall Bridge, London Bridge, Tower beach, The Pool of London, Greenwich, Tilbury, Wapping and so on. These are the areas where she searches and often finds her treasures. When I say 'treasure' I don't mean hoards of gold doubloons, although she has found a lot of coins, what I mean is artifacts that are ordinary things which historical Londoners have used or worn over the years, dating back to Roman times. It seems that city dwellers have been dumping their rubbish into the river for centuries, in fact at one stage The Thames was declared 'a dead river' because of it, but since then it's been cleaned up and fish have now returned.

I could go on and on about this book. It is a 'delight'. It's one of those books that combines an author's present day search or experiences of their subject with nuggets of historical information on the finds. So we hear about Henry VIII and his palace at Greenwich, the sewage problem Victorians faced (The Great Stink), the notorious Thames fogs, the history of the pipes used for smoking, coin production, about how a beach in front of the Tower of London was converted into a proper beach for Londoners to use, the list is endless and I loved every single chapter. It is extremely strong on atmosphere - London and its history, the river, the people who lived and worked along it - they live and breathe in this book. And like all wonderful books it's made me look at my shelves to see what else I have to read that's connected. So I have:

London Clay - Tom Chivers

Thames: Sacred River - Peter Ackroyd

Old London Bridge - Patricia Pierce

1700 - Scenes from London Life -  Maureen Waller

London Fog -  Christine L. Corton

And fiction:

Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens

The Port of London Murders - Josephine Bell 

So, that's just by having a cursory look at my bookshelves and Kindle. Suspect a serious search will reveal more but that's enough to last me through the year on a casual basis because that's how I'm reading this year... casually, according to my mood.  

So, Mudlarking was my first 5 star non-fiction book of 2024. I hope, hope, hope there are more to come in this vein. And if you're interested in London, British social history, rivers, books about people with a serious  quirky hobby, then I cannot recommend this fantastic book highly enough.