The first major exhibition on mudlarking explores fascinating finds from the Thames foreshore. Interviews with artist Marie-Louise Plum and curator of London Museum Docklands, Kate Sumnall.
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00:00So, what exactly is mudlarking? Well, the definition of a mudlark is someone who scavenges
00:08the banks and shores of rivers for items of value. Mudlarking in itself is a big part
00:16of the history of London, with the activity exceptionally prevalent in the 18th and 19th
00:24centuries here in the capital, with the task of scavenging for valuables on the shores
00:30of the Thames, usually undertaken by some of the poorest of Victorian London's society.
00:39However, now mudlarking seems to have made a comeback, perhaps ironically being described
00:46by the Telegraph newspaper as the latest middle-class hobby.
00:53But through oral histories, through detective work, so it's like the history you didn't
00:57really learn in school. What's mudlarking? Well, it's best described as searching a tidal
01:04river at low tide for items of historic interest and also the weird and unusual. What makes
01:12it so special is that the mud in London is anaerobic, so things lost to tide and time
01:18are captured in this mud and it's like they're in a cocoon, saved in there until the tide
01:24comes in, washes out and these items are revealed. So, you need a permit to mudlark and that
01:30is available from the Port of London Authority. The exhibition Secrets of the Thames draws
01:36together well over 50 years of mudlarking, so you've got this like real gelling together
01:43of the past, how it started, mudlarking before mudlarks as they are today. And then you can
01:51also see, there's an amazing find that's a Roman amphora, just the top of an amphora
01:59and that was found by a mudlark, but then the next part, the extraction and getting
02:04that off the foreshore and into the museum and recorded, that took, you know, institutions
02:10so the London Museum, the Archaeology Department. One of the more surprising artefacts that
02:15came up actually was discovered while we were making the exhibition and that is the largest
02:21fragment of pottery that has come off the foreshore. It is a Spanish amphora, it dates
02:26to around 100's, 200's, so it's Roman.