Mudlarking

Lara Maiklem, (Bloomsbury, 2019)

One of my uncles buys and sells vintage objects; another uncle mudlarks at weekends beside the Thames.  My mother spent days gently cleaning claggy soil from the mis-matched bones of skeletons exhumed from her local parish church during renovation work.  She also volunteers at archaeological digs near her home and returns from expeditions to East Beach, Charmouth with the fossilised teeth of ancient sharks.  My father’s house is full of a lifetime’s finds: the lower jaw of a hyena, porcupine quills, a gannet’s skull, pebbles, feathers, fossils, a snake’s skin and nubs and twists of wood.  And Jane, my paternal aunt, fills her Highland home with the treasures that she finds during her walks in the remote hills and valleys north of Loch Ness. In the same tradition, on the windowsill behind my desk, stand two gnarled and water-worn fists of wood rescued from the tide-line of our river after flood water receded.

None of us are traditional collectors: we do not search for different versions of a single item.  Instead, I come from maternal and paternal lines of scavenger-gatherers, folk who notice objects and pick them up.  This made Lara Maiklem’s Mudlarking a perfect read for me.  Although Maiklem’s searching is much more systematic and focused than any of my meanderings along rivers and beaches, I relate to her fascination with what found objects tell us about domestic and social history. 

Mudlarking is both a personal memoir and a history of London told through the disparate objects that emerge from the silty banks of the Thames.  It is also a fascinating insight into the culture of mudlarking itself.  Maiklem writes with clarity and pace so my absorption in the details of her discoveries never sagged.  Her journey along the Thames, structured into chapters orientated around particular locations, gave a shape to the river’s muddy tides and I loved learning about the objects that Maiklem found.  In particular, I was completely transfixed by her descriptions of objects that hinted at the lives of individuals: a comb, a ring, a thimble, a needle case and a Tudor child’s shoe.

I read this memoir-history during the hot May of lockdown but it occurs to me that Mudlarking would be a lovely companion for the long, cold evenings of November or February when reading in front of the fire is infinitely preferable to actually sloshing around in the freezing mud of the Thames.