{"id":958,"date":"2026-07-17T10:43:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T10:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=958"},"modified":"2026-07-17T10:43:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T10:43:00","slug":"how-mudlarking-became-londons-hottest-hobby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=958","title":{"rendered":"How Mudlarking Became London\u2019s Hottest Hobby"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Shortly before 11 A.M.<\/em> on a recent Sunday morning, a gaggle of mudlarks\u2014people who find lost and ancient objects on the banks of the Thames\u2014were laying out their wares on tables in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a fine neoclassical church at the edge of Trafalgar Square, in London. Black tablecloths were crammed with two thousand years\u2019 worth of life\u2019s miscellany: post-medieval ear scoops, Tudor scabbards, Roman pottery, Victorian false teeth, Edwardian dog collars, Georgian coins. Jessica Forde, a mudlark who used to work at Christie\u2019s, the auction house, handed me a heavy, dark, rubber object in the shape of a beer bottle, and challenged me to identify it. (It was training ammunition from the Second World War.) \u201cWhen people say to me, \u2018What\u2019s the most valuable thing on your table?,\u2019 I cringe. I\u2019ve got no idea. I\u2019m not interested,\u201d Forde said. \u201cWhat\u2019s relevant is the stories about how these things were made, who made them, where they came from.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Odyssey 3: IMAXimum Impact<\/a><\/p>\n

Mudlarking got its jaunty name in the final years of the eighteenth century, when it was used to describe poor wretches\u2014many of them children\u2014who waded into the Thames to pick out rivets, rope, and discarded coal to sell for pennies onshore. In recent years, however, the activity has re\u00ebmerged as an addictive and Instagrammable hobby for Londoners of all classes. (Stanley Tucci is a mudlark.) \u201cIf you have the slightest bent toward history, it genuinely is the best thing,\u201d Ted Sandling, the author of \u201cLondon in Fragments,\u201d an influential book about mudlarking, from 2016, told me.<\/p>\n

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Sandling began exploring the foreshore in the early two-thousands. \u201cWe were looking for new ways to be in the city, to encounter the city,\u201d he said. Mudlarks often linger on the therapeutic and quasi-mystical dimensions of their visits to the river. (They are generally allowed to keep what they find but must not sell it.) \u201cIt\u2019s that unmediated connection to the past,\u201d Sandling said. \u201cYou are picking something up that hasn\u2019t been held by another person since it was dropped three hundred years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, like everything in this life, mudlarking isn\u2019t as fun as it used to be. Until ten years ago, anyone could poke about on the banks of the Thames and see what they could find\u2014wearing boots and gloves, ideally, to ward off Weil\u2019s disease, which is spread by rat urine. These days, mostly because of its popularity on social media, mudlarking is hopelessly oversubscribed. In late 2016, the Port of London Authority (P.L.A.), which owns the vast majority of the Thames riverbed within the city, announced that it would require permits to search and scrape the shore. (Digging has always been another matter: since the seventies, a small group of detectorists and amateur archeologists known as the Society of Thames Mudlarks has been licensed by the city to dig down as far as four feet, three and one-eighth inches.) Between 2019 and 2022, the number of licensed mudlarks in London more than doubled, to five thousand. Startled by the craze, the P.L.A. stopped issuing permits and opened a waiting list instead. When the waiting list reached ten thousand names, the P.L.A. closed that, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Since 2024, a new system of permits has designated four categories of mudlark, a satisfyingly ornate regime for what is, at heart, a deeply painstaking activity. But, if you want to take up the hobby tomorrow, forget it. There isn\u2019t even a line for you to join. You are welcome to stroll the riverbank, naturally, but not to search it.<\/p>\n

At the back of the exhibition space at St. Martin, I met Bolly May, the holder of one of fifty rare \u201ccreative\u201d mudlarking permits, which allows her to sell jewelry and other art works made from her finds. In the summer of 2024, May found a large gold Tudor ring partly sticking out of the mud. The ring held a pale amethyst, a sign of social status. The foreshore of the Thames consists of anaerobic mud, which preserves objects to an uncanny extent, but it is perturbed constantly by shifting tides and the course of the river, meaning that you are never quite sure what will be exposed and where. May\u2019s ring had been pushed to the surface, in stops and starts, half a millennium after it had sunk to the riverbed from a rich man\u2019s hand. \u201cTwo more tides,\u201d May said, and \u201cthat would have washed away.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2024, the P.L.A. announced that almost all existing mudlarks would lose their licenses and have to go to the back of the waiting list. After an outcry, the organization allowed some permits to be renewed. But the criteria are tough. You have to have mudlarked for four years (this can be waived) and demonstrate a \u201csubstantive and recorded history\u201d of both reporting finds to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (P.A.S.)\u2014an archeological service run by the British Museum\u2014and of contributing to \u201cthe educational, cultural and historic life of London.\u201d About fifty per cent of applications to renew are successful.<\/p>\n

The new rules have created an atmosphere of pressure and professionalization among mudlarks, who, like academics everywhere, now grouse about their working conditions and which of their finds are \u201crecordable.\u201d \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve got enough to be O.K.,\u201d Lesley McDonnell, a teacher from North London, said. She was standing behind a pair of horse hooves that she found close to the site of an old glue factory, near Westminster. McDonnell does three or four mudlarking exhibitions a year and has submitted more than fifteen finds to the P.A.S., including a medieval pilgrim\u2019s badge (complete with its original cloak pin) and a tiny Roman die, made of darkened bone, not much larger than a piece of gravel, that washed in while McDonnell was bent over, looking at something else. \u201cIt found me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Liz Anderson, another exhibitor, used to work in education but had always been curious about archeology. One day in 2015, unhappy in her job, she noticed a man on a beach in central London, who seemed to have lost something. She wandered down and asked if she could help. He explained that he was mudlarking. Anderson looked down at her feet and saw a piece of seventeenth-century Delft-style pottery. \u201cI don\u2019t know why. I just had a eureka moment,\u201d she told me. \u201cI thought, This has been waiting for me all my life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Anderson said that the strictures of the new permit regime were weighing on her. \u201cI can\u2019t just potter around kicking stones, you know,\u201d she said. She had to come up with the goods. \u201cThere definitely is more of a pressure, which doesn\u2019t help.\u201d Anderson talked about the importance of fostering a good relationship with your FLO<\/em>, or finds liaison officer, who decides whether or not something is recordable. Once or twice, I noticed that Anderson used the word \u201crecordable\u201d to describe herself rather than what she found, as if it were her own authenticity and distinctiveness that was being adjudicated.<\/p>\n

The man who manages the mudlarks is James Trimmer, the director of planning and development at the P.L.A. Trimmer is a surveyor by training. For most of his twenty-seven years at the Port, he has been concerned with things like dredging operations, sewage infrastructure, and the movement of freight along the Thames. (The Port of London is the U.K.\u2019s busiest port, by tonnage.) When talking about mudlarks, Trimmer seems like a seasoned provincial governor who has been dispatched to a small but restive outpost, one full of deeply held beliefs that he does not entirely understand but which nonetheless requires a measure of firm control. \u201cHobbies ended up being codified, because more people started doing it,\u201d Trimmer said. \u201cAnd without wishing to portray myself as some sort of Victorian gentleman this couldn\u2019t keep carrying on as it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

For years, Trimmer explained, mudlarking was a closed world. There were about a hundred hobbyists, whom he and his colleagues knew by name, or by sight\u2014shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the detritus of the shore. The groundswell, as Trimmer called it, began with the success of books like Sandling\u2019s and, especially, with the rise of mudlarking social-media accounts in the twenty-tens. In 2019, Lara Maiklem, a mudlark with nearly a hundred and fifty thousand Facebook followers, published \u201cMudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames,\u201d a lyrical account of her life on the foreshore, which became a best-seller. During the pandemic, Trimmer and his colleagues watched the numbers continue to increase, and in 2022 he began hearing reports of arguments on the riverbank. \u201cThere were these people who were saying, \u2018This is our area, you don\u2019t belong here,\u2019 and even reports of altercations,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was then, you know, how many is too many?\u201d<\/p>\n

The maximum number of mudlarks, which Trimmer reached after discussions with Historic England, a government-run heritage organization, and the Museum of London Docklands, was four thousand. \u201cIt seemed reasonable,\u201d he said, \u201cin the great British idea of reasonable.\u201d Most mudlarks appreciate Trimmer, even if they kvetch about the permit system. At the exhibition at St. Martin, they referred to him as Trim and gossiped about where he likes to check people\u2019s permits. (At Queenhithe, near St. Paul\u2019s, where archeologists have found the remains of a Roman quay.) Trimmer said that, compared to dealing with government agencies, he has more freedom when supervising the mudlarks, but at the same time more responsibility. \u201cYou are intruding on how people see themselves,\u201d he said. The waiting list, which is still closed, stands at around seven thousand.<\/p>\n

Read more Why Would That Help?<\/a><\/p>\n

Last June, \u201cLondon Centric\u201d\u2014an investigative newsletter\u2014reported on rising tensions among mudlarks, including a police investigation into graffiti insulting Maiklem, which was daubed in two places along the riverbank. The graffiti read, in large pink letters: \u201cLARA = FAKER LIES<\/em>\u201d and \u201cLARA = SELFISH FRAUD.<\/em>\u201d Maiklem has done more than anyone to give voice to the soulful aspect of mudlarking\u2014its possibilities for escape and discovery at the same time. (In May, on Instagram, she reposted an interview with Tucci, in which he called her the \u201cqueen of the mudlarks.\u201d) But she has her detractors, too. For years, Maiklem has been an advocate of \u201ceyes only\u201d mudlarking\u2014finding objects already exposed, as opposed to digging and scraping for them. \u201cI have always had this very, very strong conviction that people shouldn\u2019t be digging up the foreshore,\u201d she told me recently. \u201cForcing it to give up what it\u2019s not ready to give up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We were chatting on Zoom. Maiklem was in her home office in Margate, about seventy miles from London. The plan for her next book was laid out in sticky notes on the floor behind her. Maiklem observed that most nineteenth-century mudlarks, searching desperately for goods from the river, were women and children. She found it ironic that most of her critics were men, who accused her of falsifying her finds, or of hoarding her success in what used to be a male-dominated hobby. \u201cThe people who are most adamant that they\u2019re true mudlarks are very often men with metal detectors,\u201d Maiklem said.<\/p>\n

One of her rivals is Jason Sandy, who has more than a hundred thousand followers on Instagram and sits on the board of the Society of Thames Mudlarks. Maiklem and Sandy are both entranced by the story of the Doves Press type, a beautiful lead type, of which some half a million pieces were secretly thrown into the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge during the First World War after a feud between its owners. Since Maiklem wrote about the Doves type, in 2019, she and Sandy have competed to tell the story in their own mudlarking vernaculars. Maiklem was delighted to stumble upon a comma. \u201cIt was, as far as I knew, the only Doves Type comma in the world,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

Sandy, who uses a metal detector and likes to dig at night, recently donated fifty pieces of the type to a museum dedicated to one of the owners of Doves Press, and plans to complete the set. When we spoke, Sandy, an architect from North Carolina, told me he had been up until 2 A.M.<\/em> that morning, to catch a very low tide, and had found a further twenty-two pieces. Neither Sandy nor Maiklem referred to the other by name, but each was eager to defend their mudlarking practice. \u201cIt\u2019s not the way you find it\u2014it\u2019s what you find,\u201d Sandy said. \u201cThe most pristine artifacts come out of the deeper, blacker mud,\u201d he said. \u201cThey come out as shiny and new today as the day they were dropped.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sandling, who wrote his mudlarking book ten years ago, has let his permit lapse. In part because of the permit system, which he opposes on principle, and in part because he lost the joy of searching. \u201cI was finding things for Instagram,\u201d he said. Since he left the foreshore, Sandling has watched his fellow-mudlarks bicker and feud like passionate hobbyists do anywhere. \u201cYou get it in a knitting circle or a book group\u2014it\u2019s exactly the same dynamic,\u201d he said. Presumably it was similar in the nineteenth century, when mudlarks scrapped over bones and coal and counterfeit coins instead of P.A.S. entries and likes. When I asked Trimmer, who understands the motives of mudlarks better than most, whether he had ever searched the foreshore, he replied more quickly than I was expecting: \u201cI don\u2019t have a permit.\u201d<\/p>\n

I went down to the shore on a brightly lit Saturday afternoon. The flow of people on the Thames Path, by the south end of Blackfriars Bridge, was constant: an unbroken procession of Londoners and tourists, with their sunglasses and chatter, stretching from Tate Modern to the stores, bars, and theatres of the South Bank. The tide had turned, and the sun was bouncing from office windows on either side of the water.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Frank Mnich, a mudlark from Sussex, was standing at the top of a flight of steps down to the river, looking like someone who was there to fix the drains, in cargo pants, rain boots, and kneepads, with pouches fastened around his waist for his finds. I pulled on my boots and followed. The effect of stepping onto the shore was instant and alluring. It was as if we had left the city behind\u2014or at least the living part of it. There were still noises, but they were of boats and gulls and trains. The people, the jostle, were all gone. The sky was so much larger. There was only one other person in sight, crouching at the water\u2019s edge, a few hundred yards upstream\u2014another mudlark.<\/p>\n

Mnich explained that the river and the tides had a way of sorting artifacts by density and size. (Bits of clay roof tile end up with animal bones.) He looks for metal. The Thames holds innumerable coins, dress pins, and nails from the pre-industrial era. \u201cIf you start seeing pins, you\u2019ll get other bits,\u201d Mnich said. He walked bent at the waist, with his eyes about three feet from the ground, before dropping to his knees to examine stones, sand, and hundreds of nondescript shapes that could be anything from a clam shell to a medieval button. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like a painting,\u201d Mnich said, scraping gingerly with a trowel. \u201cYou expose all its secrets.\u201d Mudlarks say it takes a year or two to learn how to search properly. As we crouched, I dully noted great big nails and a couple of broken clay pipe stems, while Mnich pulled out an old-looking coin, which he put in his collecting box, along with a fossilized tree fern and a piece of Tudor greenware\u2014sixteenth-century pottery\u2014about the size of a fingernail.<\/p>\n

We were on the South Bank, less than half a mile from Shakespeare\u2019s Globe and other Elizabethan theatres. Mnich explained that the day\u2019s takings would have been collected in cheap ceramic boxes that were later smashed to retrieve the money. \u201cOccasionally you might get a finial or partial base, which is interesting,\u201d he said. Mnich had already moved on, but I was standing there, touching a piece of early modern London, wondering whose hands had brushed its uneven, fragile surface. When Mnich wasn\u2019t looking, I put the greenware in my pocket.<\/p>\n

In 1956, Ivor No\u00ebl Hume, an archeologist, published \u201cTreasure in the Thames,\u201d in which he described \u201cthe strange hobby of mudlarking\u201d and the tantalizing moment when he spotted a mysterious artifact: \u201cAs the tide fell, the monster revealed itself as a London Passenger Transport portable bus-stop.\u201d Writing in the atomic age, Hume considered the attraction of the city\u2019s old, lost objects. \u201cIt is, perhaps, the fear of what we may do in the future that encourages some of us to look back over our shoulders and find pleasure in the past,\u201d he wrote. By the tide line, Mnich scraped away the sand and the gravel to reveal a huge set of initials\u2014\u201cE.D. 1690\u201d\u2014carved beautifully into the rock beneath. He covered them up again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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By this time, Mnich and I had wandered some way upstream and were only a few yards from the mudlark whom I had noticed earlier. She had been searching by the algae-slathered walls of the embankment, and now called us over to inspect a red gem, about the size of a ladybug, on the end of her finger. She asked Mnich if it was a ruby. He said it was probably a paste stone, made of glass, but he wasn\u2019t totally sure. \u201cThis one\u2019s quite nice,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it might actually be something real.\u201d The woman\u2019s name was Kasia Green. It turned out that she and Mnich were dating. They met because they both liked to search the same stretch of foreshore. \u201cWe kept bumping into each other,\u201d he told me later. \u201cI wasn\u2019t kind of outwardly looking for someone. It just happened. It was one of those things.\u201d Now, Mnich explained, he and Green enjoyed finding things, and enjoyed it when the other person found something, too.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more How Mary Kay Built an Empire Out of Other Women\u2019s Dreams<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Knight writes about the English detectorist subculture of mudlarking, where ancient artifacts are spotted and dug out of the muddy embankments of London\u2019s Thames River.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letter-from-the-u-k"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Mudlarking Became London\u2019s Hottest Hobby - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=958\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Mudlarking Became London\u2019s Hottest Hobby - 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