Ideas - To mudlark is to scavenge for a piece of history to keep

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Mudlarking is a hobby that's having a moment. The opportunity to take part in the painstaking, low-tech scrape through history draws thousands of people hoping to come face to face with the remnants of lives that came before them. But what can mudlarkers do that a trained archeologist cannot? This podcast takes you to the heart of London on the Southbank of the Thames River where there's mud, water — and the possibility.

Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions. like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface.

Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cairs.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.caver's to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Before we start this ideas podcast, could you follow

follow us on the app you're using. It's the easiest way to find out about new episodes as they drop. On ideas, there's something for everyone. We talk to deep thinkers and produce compelling stories to help us better understand the world in which we live. The podcast is available every weekday, so our feed has lots to choose from. If you already follow us, thank you. Maybe you could give us a review or a rating. And if there's an episode you can't stop thinking about, please recommend it to a friend. bit you do helps other listeners find ideas. Thank you so much for listening. Now on to today's podcast. What does this river mean to you? It's not like this forgiving, kindly thing. It's quite a

threatening, knowing, seeing body of water. Not a malevolent river, but a thing to be very careful of. Over millennia, the River Thames has meant countless things to countless people, a source of sustenance and danger, a dumping ground and sacred space, and both a guardian and a graveyard of London's story past. The past isn't really a very faraway land, and once we start delving, we see that the human story remains the same, you know, even if the scenery check. changes. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. And welcome to the bank of the River Thames at low tide. And then, okay, so here you are. Here we are. Right in the central artery of London. It's like

it's, you know, main vein. And like immediately, okay, you can see modern rubbish, but immediately you see hundreds, thousands of years of settlement down here. Like all this red, stuff. So much red pottery fabric which are all like pieces of old vessels, cooking vessels and roof tiles and yeah, everything. Where are we

just so that we can situate ourselves in London? Where are we? This, so we're right in the centre. We're backing onto the city of London here. Over the other side is the South Bank. So this area here is where the first, and a bit further up is where the first settlement Roman London was.

Amazing. Amazing. The Romans would approached from that side, come across, and then they settled here. And then you get medieval London here, but things moved around quite a lot after the Romans. Yeah, so this, we're going to have to stop when we get to there because the tide's still going out. Right. So does it go out even lower? Oh gosh, yeah. It'll go out really far, yeah. So we could walk, when it goes out, you can walk all the way down beyond the bridge there, down to almost London Bridge. Thames is one of only a few tidal rivers in the world. For a few hours every day, it recedes just enough

to offer up some of the many, many secrets buried within. Where would the river be if this was the tide-in? So where it stops being green, so it rises and falls up to seven meters every twice a day. That's a massive difference, yeah. Massive, yeah. And this is a really unique environment. in London, obviously, because it's the only Thames.

The feeling of it is such a different London down here. Before you get any ideas, you need to know that our guide has a permit that allows her to come to the foreshore, the bit of riverbed that gets exposed when the tide is out. I'm Marie-Louise Plum online. I'm known as Old Father Thames. And I'm a mudlark artist, writer, poet. Old Father Thames? Old Father Thames. It's, Old Father Thames is the spirit of the river. So it's the

kind of physical embodiment in spirit form of the river in the same way that lots of bodies of water have a have a spirit related to it. Whether Old Father Thames is a man or a woman or a whatever. I mean, who knows. I think it's everyone who's ever touched the river or been touched by it. And that kind of gets to the heart of the whole thing, doesn't it? It's this, what you do really is about the stories of people. Yeah, precisely. It's exactly that. It's the stories of individuals, groups of people, transient people, and the river that remains running through it and has been there through it all.

Mud Larks have long scavenged the river mud here, looking for pieces of London's deeply layered history. It's truly an art form and Marie kindly agreed to give me an in-person tutorial. What we're looking for are like quite nice these will always catch you out. Tiny bits of shell that look like coin. Oh, it looks like a coin, yeah. Yeah, you want patches of this kind of really dark mud

where things catch as they sort of the tide, pushes and pulls. You really know what to look for. Yeah. And there's a rhythm to the river that you obviously understand. Yes, completely. So, I mean, in terms of objects in the river, you can see it. You can see, like, lines.

They're not perfect straight lines, but you can see how things, with the push and the pull of the tide, things sort by size, weight and shape. So if you find lots of washers, you know, like the mechanical metal bits, pins, other little metal bits, all in a congregate. gated area, you might find coins there too. Okay. So... So... So I'm just going to tip

some of these up and see if there's anything. So just when we're standing here, I do want to ask just how you even began in this. Like the first time even occurred to you to start doing this. Weirdly, and I don't know what the disconnect was. I came down to the foreshore in about 2005

just a one-off and found some pipe, found some bits and bobs. And as I said, I don't know why I didn't continue. I just thought, that was nice. And at that time I was living in London and I didn't even realise I don't think that you could come down. Anyway, then I didn't go again for ages. We get to 2015. I started coming down again. The reason being, I'm always looking for ways to connect with history that are a bit quite hands on and require a certain amount of searching and opportunity and potential to find.

So I'm quite nosy and I like rifling through things, whether it's stories or facts or physical objects in archive. What do you do for a living? I'm an artist, so yeah. So I'm like the triple whammy nightmare of artist, writer, mudlark. And all my work is concerned with digging in some way, like finding identities. And I do a lot of writing, again, about belonging. identity, place, space. Yeah.

So it all ties in. Oh, I see some blue there. What is that? This one. That is a piece of Delftware. So this is tin glazed English Delftware. So like Delftware from Delft in the Netherlands. We made our own here.

Yeah. And that's 1680 to early 18th century. Wow. So it would have been part of a vessel. Pot maybe, ointment pot. a bigger vessel. Yeah, tiny piece there. When does that begin to become interesting?

What sizes it have to be for you to care? Bit bigger, with a nice design on it. Yeah, exactly. So you get, because you find lots of these delftware tiles that break, they're always broken, pretty much always, but you might get a little vignette of someone in a sailing boat or a person at work in a field. Or so if you find something like that looks like a tiny artwork in itself, Defect Keeper.

Keeper. Okay. Although on a dry day, I've got to tell you, I'm not beyond keeping something just with a little splash of decoration. This is interesting. So you can see this is, so this isn't the brick, but this is the cement that would have been on the inside of a brick. So this is, you know, it's just a bit of old wall, basically. So wherever that's come from, dumped. Is that typical that you'd find bits of wall?

Like do people dump things in the Thames? Yeah, for 2,000 years. Pretty much. Yeah. The Thames, you know, was before Basiljet and our revolutionized sewer systems, everything went in the Thames. So that's why you find so much bone. Like, there's all this bone here.

So nice rib bone, a piece of scapula. Once you start looking, you'll see bone everywhere. And it's from abattoirs. tanneries, butcheries, chopped houses, you know, dining, domestic waste. And it would all come down here. This is a little piece of stoneware. So it's salt glazed stoneware, but these came from Germany originally. And then again, we worked out how to make this kind of fabric and glaze.

And these things, there's a really famous mudlark and find called a Bartman jar. Big belly jars with a bearded man on the neck. That's that kind of thing. So, I mean, the stuff you want to look for is obviously with a little character face on the neck and the belly or a cartouche on the belly with a coat of arms. So a plain piece like this isn't as covetous as... Not now.

Yeah. Or if you find ten of those that belong to the same piece or something. Precisely, yes. You know, I'll always find something interesting. Yeah. Not necessarily always significant. Mudlarking has never been as popular as it is now. It used to be a sort of very niche hobby.

And then with social media, it has exploded into something that is very well known, very sort of recognisable. And we've got so many books that have been published in the last few years. So there definitely is an interest for it. Interest is so intense. that the Port of London Authority has had to pause taking new applications and caps permits to 4,000 a year. And some of the things that mudlarks find are simply jaw-dropping. So in 2025, the Museum of London opened its first major mud-larking exhibition.

Mudlarking is something that is so unique to London, I would say, just because of where the Thames sits and right in the middle of the city and has been the protagonist, if not the witness of so many events in history that have impacted not just the people in the city, not just the people in the nation, but people all around the world

because of Britain's global role, but also because of the tidal nature of the river. So the push and pull of the moon create a tidal difference. that is basically 7 to 10 meters of what's a difference when the tide is in and when the tide is out. So that creates really the perfect concoction of situations that allowed mudliking to be possible. My name is Tina. I am one of the Visitor Experience hosts here at the London Museum. I work at the dog site and I've been here for, you know, a few years and I helped write the After-Hour store.

for this exhibition. In addition to all that, Tina LeCode has a degree in archaeology. Origins of mudlarking are actually a little bit older than many people might realize. We tend to think of mudlarking as a very modern hobbit, a very contemporary sort of pastime. But mudlarkin actually was born in the 19th century.

And it was a different sort of mudlarking. It was done by people who were very impoverished and very desperate. They would go down on the fourth. for sure to search for practical items that they could trade off usually for very, very little money. So like valuable things, like metals or? No, well, yes. Practical items such as pieces of rope, piece of coal, old metal, just items that could still

be valuable when traded off because they were practical, right? You did have some people maybe going into the sewer system and looking for more traditionally valuable objects that maybe, you know, got accidentally flushed down. But mudlikes in its most traditional sense would be people going to search for, you know, lumps of coal, all iron, copper nails, all little sheets of metal. All of these things could have been melted down and reused. So it was valuable in that sense. Make a good living doing this. They would not do. It was usually like very, very little money. But from what we do have from these descriptions, it would, would be people that otherwise would not have any other source of income.

So we're looking at very young boys, sort of ages 8 to 15, or older women. It would be the people that would not necessarily have any other ways of getting an income. So that was pure desperation, but also, you know, not wanting to give up. But what are we talking about here? What time period, approximately? 19th century. So it was fairly common. They were fairly present in the visual.

cultural culture of the era as well. We do have a lovely painting from the 1850s over there that does portray to mudlikes here as part of the landscape really. A picture of the painting is on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. After the Victorian period then, it kind of like falls out of popularity. We do have mentions here and there at the beginning of the 20th century about mudlags, but it tends to mostly indicate sort of like school children go into the Thames. sort of, you know, looking for little knick-knacks, but not as an actual profession or anything like that. And when was the renaissance of the return of it as a regular practice? It starts a little bit from the sort of 70s and 80s, and then it really picks up after that,

but it is not until, like, well in the after-war period that people start to get interested in the Thames as a source for archaeological material. And actually, it is the longest archaeological... site in Britain if you think about it. It's a 70 kilometres stretch from the English Channel to the locks of Teddington. So when it's... That's a lot of history. That is a lot of history.

Yeah, and it's all mixed together. And that's really what tends to really inspire the mudlarks. So nowadays, you know, we're very far away from the sorry, desperate figures of the Victorian period. Nowadays, mudlarks are people that are extremely passionate,

that are enthusiastic. They do it as a hobby. They do it because they're interested in history, because they're interested in the river. A lot of them talk about the sort of meditative effect of it. You're down there. It's you and the mud and the water

and the possibility, right? I like that. You and the mud and the water and the possibility. Yeah, they talk about the thrill of discovery, of not knowing what it is that you're going to find next. because you can find prehistoric objects next to, you know, 20th century next to Roman, next to yesterday's pack of crisps that someone threw away. Most likely that.

Yeah. But it is, but I wonder if, I mean, I think it's sort of universally interesting to people. Yeah. Because it's a kind of time travel in a way. Absolutely, yeah. And a lot of people, a lot of the mudlarks, you know, were interviewed for this exhibition or in one of the many, many books that have been published about it. They talk exactly about that.

They talk about coming face to face with history and about feeling that connection. It is an archaeology of the people by the people. What can a mudlark do that a regular historian or a regular archaeologist can't do? Gosh, what a question. It's multi-pronged. The answer is multi-pronged.

It's complicated because, obviously, you know, mudlarks abide by rules and not in the same way that archaeologists do but we have our own rules written into the terms of our permit which you have to have to mudlark but i think again it's that hands-on thing you know we we're slightly less restricted than archaeologists in the way that we find and record um items items on the terms are referred to as out of context in that no one knows how, why, they are here. There are places you go where you know you'll find certain things because of the settlement that was here.

But as I said, four, you could technically find anything anywhere. Generally, if something washes out of the mud, it's been there since it was dropped. But you can possibly find things that have been dropped later, you know. I mean, it's possible. Say you have an antique that you keep for many years and then you lose a lot later after the fact of its creation. At what stage do you have to share what you find?

With authorities or with... It's complicated. So everybody has the responsibility to record anything that's over 300 years old, anything significant with the London Museum, finds lay as an officer. I, because I'm a member of the Society of Thames Mudlarks, have to do quite an extensive diary about what I find, where I've been, what I'm doing, as we have privileges that other mudlarks don't have.

Reporting-wise, as soon as you find something amazing, you know you're going to try and get, yeah, you just need to get an appointment straight away and just have it looked at and recorded. This kind of sandy stuff isn't great. So a lot of the time you have to just... Okay, it's quite active. Like I walk around, I look for stuff,

I spot somewhere and I think, going to get in there. I'll give it a scrape. But a lot of the time, things pop up when, oh, there's a nice, okay, there's a nice piece of pottery. I will, I will wait for a second. Okay, yeah. So it's down there. I don't know if you can see it. But this little piece here, you know, we were talking about the neck of Bartman jars earlier. So when you get a little piece like this with a tiny sprig of something. So from that tiny design there, I can probably find exactly what the vessel would have been. So how old would that be again? This is 17th to 18th century. And they originally were imported from Germany. And then a guy in Fulham called John Dwight

worked out the recipe and how to make this durable high fire. He was trying for years. So then he had his own factory, the Fulham Pottery, who were making the same like Bartman Jars and big bellamy. So, and that's kind of with pottery stuff. So when I started off, I just really liked metal. I just really liked coins and buttons and seals and... The shiny stuff? The shiny stuff.

And then I started really appreciating pottery because of the stories that are attached to it. and the trends in producing different kind of wares. So if you think about China, before we were getting export pottery, their porcelain recipe, you know, the top secret, top secret. And we tried for years and years to work at how to make it. And that really, you know, that kind of tin glaze stuff I showed you was our answer to it because the outer,

of those vessels were so white and shiny, so we were trying to, like, pass that off as sophisticated as porcum. Marie's lifelong obsession with collecting physical traces of people's lives is very personal, a kind of nostalgia, born out of a tumultuous and uncertain childhood. Like, the bare answer is that I find people difficult, and I access people through objects and place, and I sometimes find contact with other people overwhelming.

So I try and get to them through things. Her collection has evolved and grown over the years, and every new piece is the opening to a whole volume of social history. Now, I know that's a bone that I'm quite interested in. I haven't told you about my bone interest yet. I'm not going to take it out because it's so, you know what, it's just so deep in there, but you can see that's like, knuckle of a, I think it is.

So there'd be another bit there and it'd be quite a long bone down there. Maybe a cow or a horse. I'm really interested in bone because you find lots of bone tools. So bones were used for all manner of things from like hairpins, ear scoops, nail, you know, vanity kits, whatever. And they were also used by people, both. in a domestic setting and in workshops who created pins by hand. I'll find some pins and show you,

but the foreshore is littered with handmade pins from 1400 to 1800 which is really what held us into our clothes from the medieval to post-medieval period there were buttons but pins were the thing for a long time. When I find these bones

and you can see all the grooves in through where the pins have been filed they're just really tactile objects But the biggest point for me is they are waste products that have gone through processes from being slaughtered to, you know, an abattoir to a butcher or a tanner. Then the bone goes on to whoever needs it, whether they're in a studio setting. So that's like part of their livelihood. And it's, you know, I can't totally put into words what it means. But obviously animals were, you know, used in their thousands, like for food and for whatever.

but nose to tail and just every part of the animal being used. It's kind of a question that comes up and I need to ask it. Do you ever find human remains? Not me, thankfully. I have a friend who has found many, yeah. I mean, I'm thinking of someone who's, you know, relatively like modern people who've died. Then lots of mudlarks have found medieval remains. So, yeah.

And it's kind of a thing that obviously it's a really sensitive subject and area. And if you do find human remains, you have to contact the police. And they generally take things away and check them. But mainly it's, you know, it's medieval bones. But no, I haven't. I haven't ever. So what I was saying when I spotted that thing was that sometimes if you just stop for a bit and then catch something out of your peripheral vision.

Then the find comes and that is kind of... Sounds a bit mystical, doesn't it? But I think there is something in it. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the first thing that came to mind was writing, actually. Because if you really focus hard and try hard to write, sometimes you have a hard time, but if you kind of just relax and let it happen, then...

Exactly. Sometimes you need to just sort of get up and go away and think... Not think, clear your mind, and then the thing comes. Yeah, interesting. Same here. I mean, that could be absolute rubbish, but I do find that when I am really Jones in for something, I really, like, want something, it doesn't turn up. And then when I, you know, I could just be perched down and there's an amazing thing.

There's some more blue here. Here I come. Yes, I saw that. That's a bit later. So this is. You can tell. Yeah, this is. transfer printed. So this is probably even 20th century. Oh wow. And so this is machine printed. So it would

be made, you know, printed on the factory going along about with a... Different than the other one we saw. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very much. And high, high fired. It's really hard fabric, like heavy. So yeah, I'll pop that there though because someone might want it. Yes. But you can see, so like all around here, I won't get this out because it's stuck under. But there are signs of... You know, that's the base of a bottle. So there are just signs everywhere of eating and drinking. Yes, yes. More blue.

Yeah. Different blue. Different blue. Bottle neck. So that's an earlier one. You can tell it's hand blown. Tiny fragment. But all these oyster shells, you know, oysters were staple of our diet.

Inexensive. Right. And available. And available. So, yeah. It's kind of like traveling through time a bit Yes, completely In fact, oh, there's a slug of light

It hasn't got any letters on But that's like a lino slug So it would have had, this is a spacer I think You know, when you get a sentence of print For a print press You get low as a print type Downhead letter press type Interesting

What did you say? Is it kind of like time travel? Yes, completely And in fact, I mention that all the time. I call it tide traveling, because we're traveling on every tide through foreshore found objects. Yeah, completely. It's kind of what everybody wants to do. Yeah. It is like adventuring. I think one of the, look, there's a piece of pipe. So there's a piece of clay pipe. I mean, these stems are everywhere. Cigarette butts of yesterday.

Yes. Yeah. I think that, you know, it's the opportunity and the potential for an amazing find. And Marie has managed to dig up a few amazing finds over the years, and we're about to get into them. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Every day, your eyes are working overtime. From squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late night drives and or early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan, advanced technology

that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cairs. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.cairs.com to learn more. If you're worried about feeling lonely in the afterlife, why not hire a corpse bride? In Lindsay Wong's new novel, a grad student becomes a corpse bride to pay off her family's debt.

If that sounds made up, think again. Here's what Lindsay told me on my podcast bookends. In Chinese culture, there's this idea of an arranged deaf marriage is called Ming Hun. And so sometimes we'll just try to find another dead body or they'll try to find a living person. Usually a marginalized person, they'll kill them and put them in a coffin. Check out the rest of that conversation on bookends with me, Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. Four fathom rise. Conrad had that.

the fullest measure of you. Like his dark forest, unceasing service, my river has teeth, clever, watchful eyes, able to filter spinnaker and mast, dolphin and martingale, from lost, lonely souls. Marie-Louise Plum is an artist, writer, poet, and mudlark. On a sunny morning in London, on the foreshore at low tide, I asked her what the River Thames means to her. Her answer came in the form of a poem. It's extendable cavernous stomach, one minute hollowed out, empty and flat,

reinflated, fat and happy, brimming with woven bodies jostling for headship. Finger to toe, to knee, to hip, to tail. Man, woman, child, animal, insect, speck. Old, young and not yet born, ghost and spectre. This flow of tumbling creatures, graven image. For all worshipful people lost to time, tidal thames takes shape as Leviathan. In a little satchel, Marie brought some of the treasures she's discovered mudlarking.

You'll have to forgive my repeated expressions of astonishment. I just couldn't help it. You'll see what I mean. Photos are on our website. CBC.ca.ca. slash ideas. All right. So, big ticket item is this.

It's a Henry the 8th coin. So. Wow. Yeah. So 16th century. And there's something kind of special about this coin in that Henry the 8th and the nickname Old Copernone. because he was debasing his coins

because of his love for spending on wars and what have you, partying, whatever, wenching, I don't know, he started debasing. So these were silver coins and he was mixing copper into it. So when the coins started to wear, you can see that kind of coppery cover. It would rub.

So the coin would rub through wear and his nose was the first thing to rub down. So that's why he got the nickname Old Copper Nose. Oh my gosh. Yeah, this is a Henry the 8th coin. Do you remember finding it? I do because... No.

So this is one of those brilliant things. You can see on there the shield still and some of the legend around the coin. I found it and thought it was on last knocking. I was about to come off the foreshore. Saw this little bit wedged and it was completely black. But it had the feel of something. And, you know, always check your scraps because it could have just been a scrap of rubbish. Yeah.

I got it home. cleaned it, started to see some of the shield and thought, yes, hammered coin. So I didn't know it was a Henry until I took it into the Fines Liaison Officer. It's bent. You might say, oh, it could have been bent as a love token. It might be a bit of a stretch. You do get love tokens that are bent, but they're usually in an S shape.

Great. So it may have just, you know, who knows. It could have just been knocked. Who knows. But there's a Henry. Yeah. It's so extraordinary. Okay, so I've got another coin here just because it's got such a lovely relief on there.

You can see. So that's Sir Charles I first. So what year would that have been? This is the 17th century. I can't remember the exact same. It's a 16-something. But this is a farthing. So these were made for relatively short period of time.

But anyway, that's just a really nice example of it. And it's so fine if you want to hold it. Yeah. Oh, wow. So, you know, how on earth are you not losing these from your little drawstring curse? I didn't even see that when it's from the grounds. That was, actually, this one was sticking up exactly in the way that those shells. Isn't that extraordinary?

It's like a little leaf. Yeah. Exactly. So fine. And it was just like that when I found it. The Museum of London's Secrets of the Thames exhibition displays about 350 objects, all found by mudlarks like Marie. Short answer, a little bit of everything. Toys, we've got cutlery, we've got medical devices of the 19th century,

we've got some stolen Wimbledon medals and dice, we've got old pieces of timber, we've got smoking clay pies as a most common find of all, we've got some really old prehistoric weapons. A Neolithic, you know, late bronze. Ceramics from all the time periods possible. I'm just going to, yeah, show you some of my favorite ones. One of the most striking is a sword, likely made of bronze, and sitting inside a glass case.

The sword is from the late Bronze Age. So we're talking sort of 900 BC. That's almost 3,000 years ago. And it looks really nice and lovely and clean and whole. But when it was plucked out of the foreshore, it was covered in what, you know, archaeologists and conservatives and mudlarks called the Thames Race. So that's...

The Thames Race. It is basically a layer of sort of copper corrosion and a thin layer of calcareous concretion, which basically means when these was plucked out, you could almost not see the sword at all. How would they even know? Well, you could see a little bit of the hill. You could see a little bit.

It was generally sword shaped. Right. So this is one of the oldest objects that you have here. I would say. So we do have quite a lot of slightly older bits. So sort of this is like Neolithic or like early Bronze Age. So these would have been slightly older. But that's quite impressive.

Really, really striking because usually they are not. these well-conserved. It was brought here. We actually had to take it to the British Museum because they have a larger X-ray machine. And yeah, and when they did the imaging and they saw that the sword was complete and stable, they were so excited because it meant they could clean it, they could research it. And yeah, it's a very remarkable find as well because once it was cleaned and, you know, you could do all the careful tests that conservators do or the, you researchers do the archivist. And it is such a

very precise way of doing things that you could look at all the little notches and see if it was used in combat. And not only that, you could see if it was used offensively or defensively. So that's the really cool thing.

This one was never used. Brand new. Brand new. Wow. And so one of the theories that we have, one of the hypotheses, is that it could have been intentionally deposited into the river. So we don't, you know, have a super complete understanding of what prehistoric people were doing

and why they were doing it because obviously no written sources. And archaeologists have been guilty of sometimes, you know, going, oh yeah, this was ritual. We don't, you know, we don't really know. I think I'm really impressed at the size of some of these objects. I always imagined that they would be tiny little, you know, rings or hair combs or buttons. But no, you've got these big items that are really surprising, including this sword. We obviously cannot say for certain that this was any sort of offering. But it is a theory, right?

Because it was unused, because it was untouched, we do know that they tended to be offerings to the river. And that echoes through the centuries. That duality of the river is something sacred but dangerous, a giver and a giver and a giver. take care of life, right? It gives you all these resources. The water, the food, the clay, the wood. It gives, but it also takes, because it's a dangerous place. It can flood. It is tidal. The, you know, current is really strong. Even today, if you were to go under, it is a very dangerous place to be. You do have to, you know, keep your wits about you. But that duality, I think, has fascinated people through the centuries. The oldest thing here is this.

This is Roman. And it's a piece of roof tile. So this is a piece of tegula. And their roofing system was so brilliant. We still use it today, you know, for keeping out water. So these tiles like this with the little lip abutted each other, and then there'd be a tile around going over. Interlocking.

Interlocking, yeah, tiling system. So, yeah, we find, you know, relatively lots of Roman. So how many years ago? 43 AD to 410 AD is there so like almost 2000 yeah 2,000 years um pretty much yeah and you can find these with things like animal imprints in or if because they were made and then left to dry in the sun so another mudlark mark saudan has one with ears I think it's like ears of corn or some kind of plants in the back where they've um so amazing stuff then a lovely cuff link here which is 18th to 19th

century. It's silver-plated. Just one, one of one half. But the interesting thing is, this one has got a maker's mark. So Bond was the silver smith. Yeah, unusual to have the maker's mark on these. So you know who led it? I know his name. I would really like to find out who Bond was. So I've gone back through archives and through guilds and I can't find who it is exactly. There you go. Yeah, it's very, very pretty. Do you ever go down, like, the rabbit hole of trying to figure out? Oh, my gosh, yeah. For hours and hours and hours.

And then I write about what I find. A lot of it goes on Instagram, where Marie regularly updates her thousands of followers on her treasure hunts. Well, this is a first. Either someone else has left these here, or this is my lucky day. So, not one, but two boat hooks. Okay, vastly different in size, obviously.

And yeah, of course I'm gonna take them home. We do have some objects from, you know, old Roman London, Lundinium, and we do think that these ones could have been offerings to the river, the Romans. We do have quite a lot of written sources about them. They did seem to have that attitude towards rivers as something sacred, yes, fearsome, right?

And maybe requires some gratitude or some... Absolutely, yeah. Offering, as you say. Some offerings, some sacrifices, if you want to call it that. So we have these beautiful marble head right here. That one is, you know, beautiful young woman with this highly sort of idealized features really belie really little emotion

and we think that that one is probably a copy of a much older statue, the Aphrodite of Knitus, which is an ancient Greek sculpture and obviously then the copy of the Greek statue but adapted to more sort of imperial tastes because a Greek woman would not have worn her hair like that and all those tiny little details

and we have the little head over there and then we've got this little figurine there in the middle. He is missing an arm and a hand and his features are not quite as detailed as you can see. They're a little bit more rough. But we do think, given the material, given that pose that is very heroic

is the kind of pose that you would associate with the big important statues of the ancient world with the Contrapposto and everything. So we do think that probably was a male deity. Could have been Apollo, could have been Mercury. We don't quite have enough iconography there to identify it, but it does look like it could have been, you know, someone with quite a lot of power about them.

And how old do you think that one is? This is all from Roman London, so it could be anywhere between 48 and 450 sort of common era. Wow. But yeah, we have the Romans, doing their offerings into the river. But we also get quite a lot of evidence from medieval Christian people

doing some offerings of their own. If you see those little figures, those are all pewter, we call them pilgrim badges. So what happens is in medieval Britain, well in medieval Europe really throughout, you go and visit

holy shrines. The most popular one here near London would have been Canterbury. So you go to Canterbury, you visit the home Shrine, in this case it would be the shrine to St. Thomas Beckett. And then, you know, you buy a little souvenir. You buy something that will, you know, remind you of this important travel that you've done. Sometimes they're little badges, sometimes you get little like bells or little vials

of Hollywood, a little bit of everything. That's really beautiful. I know. This example is a small depiction of what's believed to be the 12th century figure Archbishop Thomas Beckett, the patron saint of London, riding a peacock, metal, detailed, small enough to hold in your hand. And where we find them is near medieval ferry points, near medieval docks. So again, what we think was happening is that you go on your pilgrimage, you do this, you know, big travel, which is not necessarily always a safe thing to do. and then you come back to London and you deposit this

reminder of your travel into the river as a way of thanking God for your safe passage. For getting back safely, yeah. Obviously, you know, Christians don't necessarily believe in multiple gods but that idea of the river being a little bit sacred I think probably would have remained. It is a powerful thing. So we do find a lot of them

And what's interesting about these guys in particular as well that relates to us here at the museum is that we've had so many donations from mudlarks for these medieval pilgrim badges that London Museum has the largest collection of medieval pilgrim badges in the world. One corner of the exhibition is devoted entirely to Roman artifacts, including a huge olive oil jug and even sandals.

Many of them were found in one particular location that for obvious reasons is not made public. It really is a testament of how important that relationship between the mudlarks and the museum is, because all of these research wouldn't have been possible without their collaboration, without their time, without their knowledge, because, you know, they might not do this for a living,

but that doesn't mean that they're incredibly knowledgeable and that they don't take the research incredibly seriously. and we are really, really, really lucky and really, really appreciative of the fact that they are willing to help us paint a much clearer picture of what was going on in Rome and London at the time. What did these objects collectively tell us about London? The people were here, really.

It sounds like a sort of banal answer. It doesn't. You know, people were here, they were eating, they were loving, they were grieving, they were moving around, they were emigrating, coming home, they were doing the rituals, they were dressing themselves. One object might not seem like much,

but when you put it all together, I do think it paints a picture of the centuries and centuries that London has existed and the millions and millions of people that have called this place home, whether it was permanently, some people never left London, whether it is temporarily, whether you were born here or not born here, you know, this place becomes your home.

It becomes your place. And a lot of these people live their mark with that. A lot of the stories that we've touched upon earlier, there tend to be a little bit of a mystery. But we do have some stories that come out of the river that are actually not questions but answers. Oh. How refreshing. I know, yeah. Sometimes it's like, oh, finally.

So we have these medals here, one, two, three, four, five. And they were found by, you know, a mudlark, as you do, walking on the foreshore. But when they found them, he was just like, oh, these look particular. I'm not quite sure what I'm dealing with here. So, again, he contacted the portable antiquity scheme, took them to a British museum to be examined.

They cleaned them all properly and they did some research And then what they found was that these are original Wimbledon medals Oh my God So they are dated between sort of mid-1970s to 2002 And they were awarded to iconic American tennis player Peter Fleming for his participation at Wimbledon alongside John McEnroe Every one of these?

Yeah So were they together? Were they found together? Yeah, it's four silvers and one bronze. And yeah, the story that basically unfolded after this amazing found was that Peter Fleming's house had been burglar. Someone, you know, broke in, stole a bunch of stuff. They probably thought that they could make quite a pretty penny out of these then immediately realize you can resell original Wimbledon medals

because they are going to know that these are stolen. So what probably happened is threw them onto the river as a way of getting rid of evidence. It's a convenient place to just get rid of things you don't want. Exactly, except the mud captures everything. So they stay there. I'm not too sure how long they were on the foreshore, you know, what's the time frame between his house being broken into and these being found. But they were found and they were returned.

And then, you know, Peter was really generous and allowed us to, to have them on display for a little bit. Extraordinary. He knows he's getting them back, so this is perhaps a little bit easier than the first time around. He steals them again. Yeah, but it is one of those, it's one of my favorite objects

because it is so different in the way, you know, it's a modern mystery. A mystery solved. And it is a mystery solve, yeah. Is it a bit addictive? I would say it's very addictive. Yes. Yeah.

I think it's more the potential of what you're going to find, again, is the thing. How do you think about the people that might have used the items that you find? I think about what they were doing when they were using the... So you get the contact, and it's kind of like this electric touch that connects you to someone. I always think about the kind of humdrum and every day and what's going on in their lives and were they having a happy time, where they're going through a disastrous relationship, were they trying to make something with this vessel I'm holding and it's failed,

especially if there's a firing error in it or something like that. You know, did they chuck it away and think, oh, I've got to try again. So it's really, it's their kind of internal monologues and dialogues that I'm thinking about. And I always think about actually what they think of us finding this stuff, because, you know, there are people in my family who are really dispassionate about personal, keepsakes and things and I always get very attached to place and objects and so I imagine lots of people from that past would be thinking why are they picking up our old trash get rid of it what you know what is the use but to me it connects me to them Marie has decided to downsize her huge

collection of artifacts just one example of everything the rest donated given away even if you returned to the river. Her chosen pieces still tell a story, her own. What you contribute to the story of London? Oh, goodness. That's a really tricky one. I think I contribute, I suppose, trying to unearth hidden histories of people who've been forgotten.

Who's to say that they won't be re-forgotten? I don't know. but maybe if I can bring some stories to light and share them, then that's a good thing to be doing. And then in my artwork as well, in paintings and poems and writing, that's, I think, my contribution. What's the question that mudlarking is trying to answer?

I think, who are we? What are we? And it's this intergenerational thing of how did we live then? and what's that like then being, you know, from prehistory to whatever, the most recent history, and how does that relate to us today? And for me personally, I always say, you know, I look to the past, to understand the present and try and predict the future, my future, you know, where we're going to be. The past isn't really a very far away land. And once we start delving, we see that the human story remains the same, you know,

even if the scenery changes. Thank you for joining us on this journey through history on the foreshore of the River Thames in London, England. Many thanks to Marie-Louise Plum and to Tina Lacode for their insights and time. A huge thank you also to Ashton Bainbridge from the London Museum for making this episode possible. Secrets of the Thames mudlarking London's lost treasures

was at the London Museum Docklands location from April 2025 until March 1, 2026, until March 1st, 26. Thank you also to my colleagues at the CBC London Bureau. It's worth repeating that all mudlarks on the River Thames must have a valid permit from the Port of London Authority and all fines must be recorded and reported through the Portable Antiquity Scheme.

This episode was produced by me, Nala Ayyad. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, technical production by Sam McNulty. Audio and video by Adrian de Virgilio. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca. slash podcasts.