A mudlarking year, p.2
A Mudlarking Year, page 2
In the nineteenth century people were paid to bring corpses ashore and attend the inquest to give evidence. This bounty led to unpleasant scenes at the site of incidents, with river workers fighting over floating bodies for the reward and the opportunity to search pockets for money, which was seen as fair spoil for their efforts. In the fourteenth century, people were less inclined to help. The Calendar of Coroner’s Rolls recorded on 15 September 1367 a John Farnham boarding a boat at Botolph’s Wharf near Billingsgate Market. While they waited for the tide to rise sufficiently to carry the boat off, a gale rose up and overturned the boat. ‘His corpse was carried hither and thither until Wednesday after the feast of St Michael when it was found cast by the waters…’ John Farnham lay in the water for three weeks before anyone bothered to bring him ashore.
The man I saw last September was taken east by the police boat to the temporary riverside mortuary at Wapping, a 12 ft x 12 ft metal-clad box located on a floating pontoon in front of the River Police station. Inside is a large steel tray with a drain in one end to which is attached a rubber hose for conveying leaked body juices straight into the river. Roller shutters on either side provide natural ventilation and privacy from passing boats. It is here that the bodies are ‘processed’: fingerprinted, searched and photographed.
A cold wind blows downriver and I turn back to the crowd. The priest’s white robes flap in the breeze, incense blows away across the wet tarmac, and holy water is caught up in a sudden gust that scatters it over us like rain. A simple pine cross, much smaller than I am expecting, is brought forward and thrown off the bridge. It flutters down, lands with barely a splash and is immediately taken east by the river. I watch it bob away on dirty brown waves, another trophy for the Thames, but it is too small for this job, not large enough to soothe the ghosts that haunt the bridge and the river below.
Monday 10 January 2022 (low tide 1.07 m @ London Bridge, 13.29)
Rotherhithe
I need quiet and solitude with the river today to bid it a proper New Year greeting, so I opt for the emptiness of Rotherhithe. It takes more effort to get to Rotherhithe than it does for me to get to central London. I drive to Greenwich, take the DLR six stops, change to the Underground for one stop and the overland train for another, but it’s worth it to search this long, empty stretch of the river.
The Thames is just a five-minute walk from the station. I come out, turn left and walk back on myself, heading north. I know where the river is because the sky is brighter in the distance, open and clear of buildings. I turn down a tight alleyway between a tall brick-built warehouse and a smaller, white-painted pub called the Mayflower, and I’m pleased to see the metal-barred gate at the end of the alley is open. It is at the top of a set of slippery stairs that leads down to the foreshore underneath the pub’s wooden deck. It’s been used by local people, river workers and sailors for centuries, but the regular tramp of muddy mudlarks’ boots down the narrow alley and past the pub’s entrance must annoy the landlord, and each time I visit I half expect it to be locked.
I’m finding more and more access gates locked these days. Since being caught out on an advancing tide by the sudden appearance of a generic yellow Fire Brigade padlock, I carry a set of master keys with me. This has got me out of trouble a couple of times, but I dread finding a padlock I can’t open. It is illegal to put a private lock on an access gate to the river, but that doesn’t stop people. Everyone wants a little bit of the river for themselves and often their way of doing that is to cut off access for others.
All along the north shore, from Limehouse through Wapping to Tower Bridge, private developers have done their best to block public access to the river, even where it is part of the Thames Path, which was established to provide a public right of way. Private estates have bent and exploited the rules with timed entry gates that only allow public access between certain hours. There are unhelpful security guards that make the process difficult, and angry signs and CCTV that make you feel as if you’re breaking the rules even when you’re not.
It’s not just those who live beside the river who want it all for themselves though. While most mudlarks are friendly and approachable, there is avarice, territorialism and petty politics on the foreshore too. I became starkly aware of it soon after I started mudlarking, but I’m sure it’s nothing new. Victorian mudlarks squabbled over territory and finds too, but these days social media has made it far easier to bully, spread rumours and say the sort of things that people probably wouldn’t say in person.
I mostly managed to avoid the negative side of mudlarking until I started posting my finds online. It opened me up to abuse and I started being trolled by a handful of other mudlarks who didn’t agree with my opinions about the damage mudlarking can do to the foreshore, and blamed me for telling ‘other’ people about their hobby.
‘Troll’ is a very apt name for them. Trolls lurk under bridges beside rivers, and when I’m on the foreshore I’m aware that my trolls, or those who have heard and believe the things they say, might not be too far away. Thankfully, the ones I recognise usually scuttle away quickly when they see me, studiously ignore me or glare silently as they walk past, but I have been confronted on the river too. One man walked a very long way down a completely deserted stretch of foreshore just so that he could furiously accuse me of filling it up with ‘hordes of other people’.
The unlocked gate is a good omen, there are no trolls hiding under the wooden deck and Rotherhithe rewards my efforts with some good finds. A long, thick, round wooden peg, known rather eloquently as a treenail (trenail, trennel or trunnel) comes out of the mud with a satisfying slurp and the scent of ancient tar. Treenails were used in timber-framed houses, but the smell of tar suggests this once held the creaking timbers of a ship together. Rotherhithe was a graveyard for ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were taken here at the end of their lives to be broken up for timbers, pulled apart and cannibalised for copper. The peg may have been part of a merchant ship that had sailed around the globe, or even one of Nelson’s warships, the most famous of which was the ninety-eight-gun HMS Temeraire, which was painted in ruins by J. M. W. Turner in 1838, being towed by steam tug to a Rotherhithe shipyard.
I collect pottery shards as I walk, and kneel to search a swathe of fine shingle. Nestled among the wet pebbles I find a single broken Georgian cufflink. It is a pewter oval with a clear glass paste ‘jewel’ that probably dates from around the same time as the treenail. Less than a metre from it I find a George III (r. 1760–1820) halfpenny, too worn to read the date, and a little lead figure who is fighting his way to the surface. He is just an inch high, probably Victorian, and is bravely holding up his two little fists, but without a head it’s hard to say what he once was. He may be a tiny pugilist, but it’s more likely he is a toy soldier that has lost the regimental colours he was carrying. I wash him in a puddle, hold him up for a better look and in the glorious absence of anyone else, I ask him out loud how he got so lost. In the bright river light and against the wide empty space he looks even smaller, and I think to myself how incredible it is, among all this, that we found each other.
Wednesday 12 January 2022 (low tide 1.44 m @ London Bridge, 15.19)
Central London – South Bank
A meeting with my publisher in town coincided with the low tide today, which would have worked out perfectly, but the meeting overran and I spent the last half-hour fidgeting under the desk, surreptitiously checking my watch and imagining the river turning and starting to rise again without me. I suppose it is a severe fear of missing out and I would say it affects most mudlarks, at least the ones I know. If I am near the river, whatever I am doing, I am usually thinking about the tide and working out how to get to it. Sometimes it’s almost a relief to know the tide is high and mudlarking an impossibility and I have met people for whom it has become too much. One man had to leave the foreshore for a whole year because he was so worried about the effect his obsession was having on him. I can’t imagine leaving the river though, so as soon as I am free, I race through Bloomsbury, skirt Soho, walk through Covent Garden and march quickly downhill to the Embankment.
There is a natural decline beneath the city that you feel as you walk towards the river. I bought a topographic map of the city years ago so that I could see what I was feeling. My descent to the river today begins in pinkish-red Bloomsbury at 36 m above sea level, drops to orange (32 m) at Leicester Square, yellow (25 m) on the Strand, into indigo blue (8 m) beside the river at the foot of the stairs onto Hungerford Bridge. The final length of my race to the foreshore is along the south bank, through crowds, past skateboarders, under Waterloo Bridge and past the corner where, in the summer, sand sculptors make elaborate shapes on the foreshore from the half-moon of golden sand that catches there. Today couldn’t be less summery. It is damp and cold, and the light is quickly fading.
As I get down onto the mud, the sun is low, the moon is a ghost in the sky and the river has turned. The mass of footprints tells me I am not the first to get there, which isn’t surprising because I’m late, but I still scan the patches of nails and iron along the edge of the river wall, just in case they missed something. There are always a lot of handmade nails here, with little triangular heads where the blacksmith finished them off with four strokes of his hammer. An armourer once contacted me to ask if I thought it might be possible to collect enough from the foreshore to make a suit of armour from authentic medieval metal. It’s an interesting idea, but I told him it would be virtually impossible to accurately date the nails since they had changed so little in style over centuries. I suspect any suit of armour made from foreshore-found nails would be a glorious hybrid muddle of time.
I walk west on sliding shingle, under Blackfriars Bridge and into the strangest kind of light I’ve ever seen. The best mudlarking light is often a bright January afternoon, when low light casts perfect shadows that highlight even the smallest objects. But today the falling winter sun is, for a moment, perfectly positioned to reflect light off one of the city’s tall glass buildings and onto the foreshore in front of me, creating an artificial brilliance that super-highlights every stone, dip and hollow. I lose myself for some time in the glorious details revealed by the light, until the sound of metal on shingle disturbs me. An old woman, bundled up against the cold, is scraping at the foreshore and she has left an ugly trail of deep scars behind her, but my irritation at being disturbed soon turns to fascination at the enormous pair of tweezers she pulls from her plastic bucket.
I’ve seen people searching the foreshore in all manner of ways and with all kinds of tools. They bend from the hips, kneel in the mud and sit in one place on a rock to poke about in the shingle and sand with their fingers. I’ve even seen one man lying completely flat on the foreshore, prostrate as a priest at an altar. They usually bring trowels to peel back the layers, but I’ve also seen people with hoes, rakes, dinner knives, teaspoons, forks and, of course, spades. There are some that come equipped with large garden sieves to divide the foreshore’s treasures, while others use smaller kitchen sieves and old colanders. ‘Look buckets’, plastic tubs or buckets with the bottom cut out and replaced with clear Plexiglass, don’t work well in the Thames because the water isn’t clear enough, but it doesn’t stop people from trying. I have seen people using normal-sized tweezers to pick up pins, and I once met a woman using them to sort through the sand literally grain by grain, but I have never seen anyone with such a huge pair of tweezers as these. In the half-light she looks like a giant crow searching for scraps in the tideline, beadily eyeing the mud and gravel, then using the tweezers like a long beak, prodding and poking around in her scrapings.
As the day slowly turns its face to the wall, the sun falls and the moon grows brighter. The super-light reflecting off the glass building switches off and the last of the sun paints the sky pink, warming the city and the dome of St Paul’s with a rose blush that doesn’t match the sudden drop in temperature. I zip up my jacket, blow on my frozen fingers and walk past tweezer woman as I leave the foreshore to cross the Millennium Bridge to the north side. Three gulls with sun-pinked backs fly low along the river under the bridge beneath me and from the foreshore the Thames is a mirror, reflecting the sky as it turns from pink to orange to violet to a rich indigo blue, all the colours of my topographic map. Only a plastic bottle bobbing past in the shallows breaks the surface, sending a series of shivering rings across the reflected sky.
Monday 17 January 2022 (low tide 0.97 m at London Bridge 07.48, and 1.16 m at London Bridge 20.05)
I open the tide chart on my phone, even though I know I can’t get to the river today. Low tide is too early (7.48) and too late (20.05) for me and I’m relieved; also surprised to see I’m not missing a super-low one. It is a wolf moon tonight, the first full moon of the year and the brightest. By peak illumination at 6.51 p.m., it is a brilliant flimsy disc hanging in the sky, and when I go to the window to look out for the hare that lives on the moon, it is so bright it leaves green lights dancing on my retina.
Only the moon can truly control the river. Its gravitational pull as it waxes (swells) and wanes (shrinks) on its 29.5-day cycle draws the tide up and pushes it out to sea. When I’m larking, before the sun rises in the morning and when it sets in the evening, the moon is often my only companion. Even when I’m not with the river, I know that if the rising moon is over my right shoulder, I am aligned with the course it takes through central London. The moon and the river are intrinsically linked, and I know that whatever else happens in my life, the moon will keep rising and the tides will keep turning; they are my constant, my grounding and my comfort.
Monday 24 January 2022 (low tide 0.88 m at London Bridge, 12.09)
Central London – North and South Banks
I am meeting my friend Julia on the foreshore today. I haven’t seen her for years. We used to meet up regularly on the river, but her visits ended abruptly about seven years ago. People come and go like the ebb and flow of the river. Over two decades I’ve seen a lot of new faces, but of all the curious people that find their way down onto the foreshore, relatively few become long-timers like me. Some people satisfy their curiosity with a couple of visits, while others might return for a few years, then vanish all of a sudden.
I’ve seen a pattern of obsession develop in those who come back again and again that’s similar to falling in love. An all-consuming honeymoon follows the first find. It’s a hit you want to repeat, so you come back, finding ways to weave the tides into your life. As you learn more about what you are finding and what you could find the obsession grows and a list of dreams and desires forms that can only be satisfied by visiting the river as often as possible.
Possessiveness and jealousy creep in, and in some people it becomes a mania, but in many cases it doesn’t last. Life takes over, people get older, they get sick, babies are born, jobs change and people move away from the city. For some, the cold wet days and early morning starts lose their appeal and the relationship fizzles out. Only a few develop a happy, long-term, stable marriage that becomes less intense and can endure the elements, hours of travel and weeks of finding nothing. There have been months, sometimes years when I don’t get to the river as much as I would like but I know it’s always there and I can come back. These days I often find myself missing the river more than the thrill of the find; perhaps it’s the next stage in our relationship.
I first met Julia about ten years ago, through her online blog. She wrote beautifully about her visits to the river and took her followers on a journey of discovery through her finds. But her blog was more than just a catalogue of objects and a passion for broken pottery; it was a love story, the tale of a woman with an all-consuming passion.
It began with the chance discovery of a piece of eighteenth-century Staffordshire combed slipware: a custard-yellow shard decorated with lines of brown slip pulled into waves like the top of a Bakewell tart. It opened a Pandora’s box and unleashed a rush of feelings: fervour, anticipation, disappointment and yearning. She was blinded by her enthusiasm, impassioned and entirely consumed. Midway through her blog, Julia decided to make a mosaic of the Thames from the pottery and pipes she was collecting. For eight months she documented her search for specific pieces to add to the design: blue-and-white eighteenth-century German Westerwald; clay pipe stems, which she split and cut into tiny rings; chunky earthy stoneware; blue-and-orange-patterned Japanese and Chinese porcelain; shards of creamware; Victorian transferware; medieval green-glazed borderware; and, of course, more of the Staffordshire slipware that had originally captured her heart. She used around 1,500 pieces, seven centuries of London’s discarded property and virtually every type of commonly found foreshore pottery. It was her magnum opus, but soon after it was finished, she shocked me and all her followers by announcing the end of her relationship with the river.
When I asked her later what had happened, she said in the end it was simple: she had risen at 5 a.m. to catch a tide, pulled on her wellington boots and decided to go back to bed instead. She couldn’t explain what had changed, nor the strength of her obsession, but almost overnight her need for the foreshore vanished. I stayed in touch with Julia, and then at the height of Covid, she emailed me with some bad news. She had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and the outlook wasn’t great. She asked if I was available for a lark and the answer, of course, was yes.
