History-Hunting Mudlarks Scour London’s Shores to Uncover the City’s Rich Archaeological Treasures
A new exhibition at the London Museum Docklands spotlights hundreds of mudlarking finds, from Bronze Age tools to Viking daggers to medieval spectacles
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For a few hours a day at low tide, architects, teachers, students, police officers, builders, bakers and dog walkers across London swap their stilettos, sneakers and brogues for rubber boots. On their hands and knees on the foreshore of the River Thames (the area of the riverbed exposed at low tide), these “mudlarks” get down and dirty in a race against time, searching for traces of the English capital’s “liquid history.”
Humans have dumped garbage and lost belongings alike into London’s waters for more than 4,000 years. Ruins eroded into the Thames, and cargo carted from ship to shore fell overboard. The sprawling assortment of artifacts lost and found in the river trace the story of the city’s evolution.
Londoners have foraged the Thames’ foreshore since Victorian times, first to find artifacts to sell for scraps of food and more recently to unearth the past and escape the hectic pace of modern life.
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Now, the London Museum Docklands is hosting the United Kingdom’s first major exhibition about the history and archaeology of this pastime, which is commonly known as mudlarking. Titled “Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London’s Lost Treasures,” the show features more than 350 objects discovered by 50 mudlarks, as well as the stories and photos of the dedicated explorers and researchers who uncovered them.
“The river is an amazing, dynamic archaeological site,” says exhibition curator Kate Sumnall. “That’s one of the reasons why I really love and appreciate working with the mudlarks, because they’re there every single tide, keeping an eye on things, bringing them to our attention, flagging up concerns and consistently recording their finds.”
London’s rich “liquid history”
The Thames has dominated London for millennia. The Romans established Londinium just north of the river’s marshy valley after invading Britain in 43 C.E. Colossal wooden quays stood on the ancient settlement’s riverbank. A majestic bridge linked north and south.
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Fast-forwarding to the eighth century, the East Saxon town of Lundenwic, located west of the ruins of Londinium, found international fame as a maritime trade center. By the end of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1603, around 20 wharves stretched along 1,419 feet of London’s waterfront. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the river was a bustling hub of trade, crime and traffic, with sailors, merchants, shipwrights, dockworkers, ropemakers, lightermen, fishers and oyster wives rubbing shoulders on its banks.
After the mid-19th century, though, Britain’s shipbuilding industry moved to the country’s cheaper northern waterways on the Wear and the Clyde. A “horrid sound of silence” fell across the Thames, an observer commented in 1869.
“For centuries, people turned their backs on the smelly, polluted river,” says Jason Sandy, author of Mudlarks: Treasures From the Thames. “A lot of people go down to the Thames to enjoy a drink and the scenery. They don’t realize there are thousands of years of history under their feet.”
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Mudlarks are the exception to the rule. Victorian mudlarks, mostly children, swapped discarded coal, iron, bricks, copper nails and rope for food to live another day. It was a trying existence. As journalist Henry Mayhew recalled in the mid-19th century, he once encountered a young boy whose “trousers were worn away up to his knees, he had no shirt, and his legs and feet (which were bare) were covered with chilblains,” itchy patches of skin that develop after exposure to cold air. Mayhew added, “He went into the river up to his knees, and in searching the mud, he often ran pieces of glass and long nails into his feet.”
Today, mudlarking is generally not about making a living. “When I started, mudlarking was really a niche hobby,” says Sumnall, “but thanks to Mackenzie Crook’s TV series ‘The Detectorists’ and social media, it’s exploded in popularity in the sheer number of people and number of finds.”
The Covid-19 pandemic also revitalized the Thames. “People were magically attracted back to the river because they couldn’t go on holiday,” says Sandy. “All of a sudden, the Thames beach became a holiday destination for Londoners trapped in their homes.”
Mudlarking is illegal without a valid permit from the Port of London Authority. In 2022, the organization stopped issuing new permits due to overwhelming demand. Two years later, when applications reopened, the website crashed. More than 10,000 people are currently on the waiting list, vying for just 4,000 permits available at any given time.
Uncovering the “Secrets of the Thames”
The artifacts on view in “Secrets of the Thames” testify to shared experiences across the centuries, from migration to crime to warfare. A silver drachm from Iran, lost around 600 C.E., offers evidence of far-flung trade networks, while a ninth-century battle ax reminds visitors of conflicts between the Vikings and the Saxons. In the 16th century, a wealthy merchant impatient to sail paced up and down London’s docks with a top-notch, German-made ivory sundial that was later unearthed in halves by two different mudlarks. The pewter syringes that injected mercury into sailors’ genitalia to try to cure syphilis in the 17th and 18th centuries did more harm than good.
Cowrie shells and uncut red-and-black bead tubes manufactured in the 17th century reflect the vast profits Britain piled up from the West African slave trade by trafficking enslaved people to plantations in the Caribbean. A tobacco pipe featuring an enslaved African molded on its side is a survivor of the propaganda war that successfully abolished the slave trade in Britain in 1807.
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A find made by mudlark Monika Buttling-Smith—a length of rope crafted from tobacco leaves between the 1580s and the 1660s—speaks to the origins of a modern commodity. “Beginning in the days of Sir Walter Raleigh,” Buttling-Smith says, “before being packed in big crates and pressed flat, tobacco leaves were twisted into rope and coiled and shipped inside barrels. My tobacco rope was probably cut from a much bigger section and smuggled out of a warehouse. But the villain must have thought he’d get caught and chucked it in the Thames. It’s possibly the only example in the world.”
Buttling-Smith also collects river rope made from horsehair and hemp. Rope fascinates her, she explains, “because it holds everything together, the ships to the docks, cargoes inside ships. … Rope’s central to the life of the river.”
London culture is weaved through the exhibition’s display of gold rings, fancy medieval shoes and clay wig curlers used by Georgian men. All have deep human stories to tell. Sandy and several of his fellow mudlarks have unlocked the mystery of handfuls of lead printer’s typeface found under Hammersmith Bridge, tracing the tiny letters back to a grudge.
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In 1900, printers T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker opened a business called the Doves Press on the north bank of the Thames. Together, the pair created a bespoke Arts and Crafts movement typeface inspired by a 15th-century Venetian printer. After a bitter dispute over Walker’s dubious work ethic, the duo ended their partnership in 1909. They agreed that Cobden-Sanderson would keep the printing press running and retain exclusive use of the type until he died. The rights would then pass to Walker.
But Cobden-Sanderson had other plans. At the age of 76, he swore to destroy his life’s work rather than let Walker make a penny from it. Under the cover of night, in roughly 170 trips to Hammersmith Bridge in 1916 and 1917, he threw his masterpiece into the water.
“After dumping some 500,000 pieces of the typeface,” says Sandy, “Cobden-Sanderson wrote in the local newspaper that he had ‘bequeathed’ and ‘consecrated’ it to the Thames.”
Decades later, the Irish Republican Army tried to bomb Hammersmith Bridge, forcing authorities to pour concrete around the foreshore to stabilize the bridge’s pylons. The typeface should have been lost for good. But thanks to waves generated by speedy river ferries, the concrete is now breaking up, and Cobden-Sanderson’s typeface is reappearing. Mudlarks have found more than 500 pieces so far, some of which Sandy donated to a museum housed in Walker’s old home. “Cobden-Sanderson must be turning in his grave,” Sandy says.
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A nighttime mudlark
On a recent evening in March, Sandy suggested meeting in Rotherhithe, a district in south London, for a nighttime mudlark.
“I’m the first of my family to return to Britain,” he told Smithsonian magazine. “They emigrated to America in 1638 from the Southwold area of England and started their own colony on Long Island. That’s why finding artifacts from the early 17th century is mind-boggling for me: things like my ancestors had in their pockets, whether a coin, watch winder or the clay pipes they smoked.”
Sandy steered us down slimy steps to his secret mudlarking spots. A large fox glided past, hunting geese. Just seconds from homes and pubs, the sand and gravel foreshore was silent and serene. We turned on our headlamps, and our senses were assaulted by a rich array of objects: chunks of Victorian brick and coal, oyster shells, fragments of 17th-century brown-and-blue potsherds from the Rhineland, 18th-century clay tobacco pipes, Georgian wooden ship parts, and boat moorings made from the recycled ribs of whales hunted in Greenland.
Sandy likes exploring at night because mudlarking is all about the sky above. As he explained while we scavenged the shore, “The way the moon pulls the tide out gives us this small window of opportunity” when the river’s water level falls by roughly 20 to 30 feet. “Then everything disappears at high tide. But twice a day, [the Thames] reveals these historical treasures.” Sandy adds, “I plan out my whole year in January, just based on the tides. My wife gets annoyed when I tell her that we can’t go on holiday in certain weeks because the low tides are really good.”
Mudlarks searching for hands-on history generally don’t seek out riches. After all, the Port of London Authority technically owns everything unearthed on the foreshore, though mudlarks can hold on to most of their finds. All objects believed to 300 or more years old must be reported to the London Museum.
Sandy boasts one of London’s most impressive collections of mudlarking finds. Still, he says, “It’s not just about looking for lost treasures. It’s [about] escaping into a magical place where most people don’t go. I’ve even gone mudlarking in a suit and tie and found some great artifacts. I’ve trashed so many shoes by wearing the wrong footwear, but I just had to go.”
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What mudlarking finds reveal about London’s past
To some, the Thames is like a big washing machine, constantly churning and leaving behind a random mix of finds. But the sum of the parts is larger than Lady Luck. “Some within the archaeological world feel that the foreshore is just a jumbled mess of unstratified material,” Sumnall says. “I would argue that there are layers within the foreshore that are eroding out, where you can clearly see patches of activity with its original finds.”
Among the ruins of jetties and stairs, where travelers waited for ferries, mudlarks often find accessories, coins and pins. At river crossings, daggers carried by wary port workers appear alongside remnants of shipbuilding. Near dye factories, cloth seals are common finds.
“You need a lot of historical knowledge of what happened and where in time,” says Sumnall. “But it’s also the systematic recording of the finds that helps layer our interpretation.”
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A case in point is the “Roman Hole,” a spot that has yielded a trove of objects from the heart of ancient Londinium. “Secrets of the Thames” highlights these remarkable Roman survivors: faience mosaic tesserae, bone hairpins, figurines of the gods Mercury and Venus, leather sandals, and boots with hobnails worn by the soldiers who invaded Britain in 43 C.E.
“We get beautiful pots, like an amphora from Spain lost in the unloading of ships, and a healthy dose of rubbish,” says Sumnall. “We can also see ritual activity connected with rivers, bridges and crossing spaces. There’s something slightly different going on here, and we’re trying to understand how it alters our understanding of Londinium and, in context, the whole [Roman] Empire as well.”
Buttling-Smith emphasizes that it’s essential to document these pieces of evidence while they’re still around. “We also spot wood and other organic structures on the foreshore, such as eroding ship timbers, Saxon fish traps and woven willow pathways,” she says. “As soon as they’re exposed, they start to decay and eventually wash away. It’s the mudlarks who see them the day they appear, photograph them and inform [authorities].”
The past and future of mudlarking
“Secrets of the Thames” is opening long after many say the golden age of mudlarking is over. In the years after World War II, wrote archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume in his 1956 book, Treasure in the Thames, “The river’s trinket box was opened virtually for the first time, and everything that could readily be seen was taken by the many mudlarks who foraged en masse.”
Noël Hume noted that in 1950, one could walk along the Thames and spot 15 to 20 objects worth picking up. By the middle of the decade, however, a mudlark could search half a dozen times and find nothing. “The chances of a rosy archaeological future are not good,” the archaeologist wrote. Layers of material laid down to cement large swaths of the river’s foreshore obscured traces of its past.
From the Tower of London to Greenwich, Thames Clipper boats are now sparking a renaissance in mudlarking, generating waves that break up centuries-old crust and concrete layering on the foreshore. These river ferries, as well as natural erosion and infrastructure projects, are revealing new hot spots to mudlarks.
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For all the concerns of the past, the outlook today is rosy. According to a statement, the London Museum’s finds liaison officer examines around 5,000 objects each year and records 700 of them, acquiring a small number of objects for the museum’s permanent collection. The Portable Antiquities Scheme, a program that records archaeological finds made by members of the public in England and Wales, now includes 14,000 finds made by mudlarks in its master database, offering valuable data on local history for future scholars, says Sumnall.
All the while, sawn-off shotguns; love locks inscribed with names lashed to bridges, their keys slung into the river; and other reminders of modern life are topping up the Thames. “The river is still collecting things,” says Sandy. “Instead of clay pipes, we’re finding single-use vapes. We’re creating the next generations of archaeology.”
“Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London’s Lost Treasures” is on view at the London Museum Docklands through March 1, 2026.