Mudlarking Read online

  MUDLARKING

  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Mudlark

  Tidal Head

  Hammersmith

  Vauxhall

  Trig Lane

  Bankside

  Queenhithe

  London Bridge

  Tower Beach

  Rotherhithe

  Wapping

  Greenwich

  Tilbury

  Estuary

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Note on the Author

  … an old woman with a nut-cracker nose and chin, which almost dipped into the filthy slush into which she peered, and dirty flesh as well as a scrap or two of dirty linen showing through the slashes of her burst gown, over which, for ‘warmth’s sake’, she wore a tippet of ragged sack-cloth … She slinks off to her lair, followed by an imp bearing a rusty crumpled colander, piled with its find. Its sex is indistinguishable. It has long mud-hued hair hanging down in a mat over its shoulders. Through the hair one gets a glimpse of a never-washed little face, whose only sign of intelligence is an occasional glance of wicked knowingness.

  Richard Rowe, ‘A Pair of Mudlarks’, Life in the London Streets (1881)

  MAPS

  MUDLARK

  Mudlark /’mAdla;k / n. & V. L18. [F. MUD n.1 + LARK n.1] A n. + 1 A hog. slang. L18 – E20. 2 A person who scavenges for usable debris in the mud of a river or harbour. Also, a street urchin; joc. a messy person, esp. a child. colloq. L18. 3 A magpie-lark. Austral. L19. 4 = MUDDER. slang. E20. B. v.i. Carry on the occupation of a mudlark. Also, play in mud. M19.

  Mudlarker n. + MUDLARK n. 2 E19.

  New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1993)

  It is hot and airless on the 7.42 from Greenwich to Cannon Street. I am squeezed between strangers, straining to avoid the feel of unknown bodies. No one makes eye contact and no one speaks. There is an unwritten rule of silence on the early-morning London commute and barely a murmur can be heard, just the rustle of newspapers and the high-pitched squeal of the rails as we lurch and sway towards the city.

  I know every inch of this route. For nearly twenty years it has been taking me to the centre of London, for work, to meetings, to see friends and to visit the river in search of treasure. I know when to hold on tight, where the tracks jolt the train to one side, how long the gaps are between stops and when the driver will start to slow down for the next station. For years I have watched old graffiti fade and new graffiti appear. For six months now I have been watching a sports sock, discarded and stuck to the tracks, turn from white to tattered dirty brown.

  This journey will take me seventeen minutes and I am impatient. I check my watch again and work back three hours from today’s predicted low tide. The river will be at its lowest at 10.23 a.m. My timing is perfect. I twitch and shift from foot to foot as the train pulls out of London Bridge station, willing it to speed up: I am almost there. We trundle over a railway viaduct, past Southwark Cathedral with its dappled flint dressing and Gothic spires, and through the centre of Borough Market. I look out over its glazed roof and try to spot the cast-iron pineapples balanced above one of the entrances. Then the sky opens up and I am above the river on Cannon Street Bridge, water flowing towards me from the west and away from me to the east. I scan the river on both sides, peering through the bodies, over newspapers and around rucksacks to check the tide. A patch of slime-covered rubble is just beginning to show through. It is close to the river wall, but the tide is falling. By the time I get down there the river will have dropped even further and enough of the foreshore will be exposed for me to begin my search.

  It amazes me how many people don’t realise the river in central London is tidal. I hear them comment on it as they pause at the river wall above me while I am mudlarking below. Even friends who have lived in the city for years are oblivious to the high and low tides that chase each other around the clock, inching forwards every twenty-four hours, one tide gradually creeping through the day while the other takes the night shift. They have no idea that the height between low and high water at London Bridge varies from fifteen to twenty-two feet or that it takes six hours for the water to come upriver and six and a half for it to flow back out to sea.

  I am obsessed with the incessant rise and fall of the water. For years my spare time has been controlled by the river’s ebb and flow, and the consequent covering and uncovering of the foreshore. I know where the river allows me access early and where I can stay for the longest time before I am gently, but firmly, shooed away. I have learned to read the water and catch it as it turns, to recognise the almost imperceptible moment when it stops flowing seawards and the currents churn together briefly as the balance tips and the river is once more pulled inland, the anticipation of the receding water replaced by a sense of loss, like saying goodbye to an old friend after a long-awaited visit.

  Tide tables commit the river’s movements to paper, predict its future and record its past. I use these complex lines of numbers, dates, times and water heights to fill my diary, temptations to weave my life around, but it is the river that decides when I can search it, and tides have no respect for sleep or commitments. I have carefully arranged meetings and appointments according to the tides, and conspired to meet friends near the river so that I can steal down to the foreshore before the water comes in and after it’s flowed out. I’ve kept people waiting, bringing a trail of mud and apologies in my wake; missed the start of many films and even left some early to catch the last few inches of foreshore. I have lied, cajoled and manipulated to get time by the river. It comes knocking at all hours and I obey, forcing myself out of a warm bed, pulling on layers of clothes and padding quietly down the stairs, trying not to wake the sleeping house.

  When I first started looking at tide tables, they confused me. I’m not a natural mathematician and numbers just bewilder me, so a page filled with lines and columns of them sent me into a flat spin. But I’ve been studying them for so long now that they’ve become second nature. A quick glance and I can see which tides are good and when it’s worth visiting the river. The most important thing is to choose the correct tide table for the stretch you are planning to visit. There can be a difference of around five hours between low tide at Richmond and low tide at Southend, since the tide falls earlier in the Estuary than it does at the tidal head. Even the length of the low tide varies depending on where you are. While the rise and fall of tides in the open sea are of almost equal duration, twenty-five bends in the tidal Thames and the dragging effect of the riverbed and its banks shorten the river’s flood tide and lengthen its ebb tide. This means that the river stays at low tide for longer at Hammersmith than it does in the Estuary, which in theory equates to more mudlarking time the higher up the river you go, but even then, depending on the weather and the slope of the foreshore, the river can still catch you out.

  I never look at the high-water levels, but I know that a good low tide of 0.5 metres and below will expose a decent amount of foraging space, so I scan the tide tables for these and circle them with a red pen. Spring tides mark the highest and lowest tides of the month. The name comes from the idea of the tide ‘springing forth’ and not, as some mistakenly think, the time of year when they occur. There are two spring tides every month, during full and new moons, when the earth, sun and moon are in alignment and the gravitational pull on the oceans is greater, but the very best spring tides are after the equinoxes in March and September when they can fall into negative figures. They are known as negative tides because they fall below the zero mark, which is set by the average level of low tide at a specific place. A few years ago there was a run of freak low tides that were lower than most mudlarks could remember. Those w
ere the best tides I’ve ever seen. They revealed stretches of the foreshore that hadn’t been mudlarked for over a decade and uncovered countless treasures.

  It is the tides that make mudlarking in London so unique. For just a few hours each day, the river give us access to its contents, which shift and change as the water ebbs and flows, to reveal the story of a city, its people and their relationship with a natural force. If the Seine in Paris were tidal it would no doubt provide a similar bounty and satisfy an army of Parisian mudlarks; when the non-tidal Amstel River in Amsterdam was recently drained to make way for a new train line, archaeologists recorded almost 700,000 objects, of just the sort we find in the Thames: buttons that burst off waistcoats long ago, rings that slipped from fingers, buckles that are all that’s left of a shoe – the personal possessions of ordinary people, each small piece a key to another world and a direct link to long-forgotten lives. As I have discovered, it is often the tiniest of objects that tell the greatest stories.

  TIDAL HEAD

  The Thames about Richmond and Twickenham seems to be rapidly approaching the condition of those tropical streams which disappear altogether in the summer months. Anyone who has found it his duty to steer a boat between Richmond Bridge and Teddington Lock must have often been sorely perplexed by the deviousness and scantiness of the navigable channel.

  St. James’s Gazette, June 1884

  There isn’t much to draw the average mudlark west, and I had been mudlarking for more than a decade before I decided to make a pilgrimage to Teddington. But it makes sense to begin our journey where the tidal Thames starts (or ends, depending which way you imagine the water flowing). The stretch of river between Richmond and Teddington is unusual in that the water levels are controlled. The lock at Teddington artificially ends the tidal Thames, which would otherwise continue further upstream – something in effect it still does when there’s a very high tide and the water overflows the lock. But the tide hasn’t always turned this far west. In the first century ad, it turned where the Romans built their bridge, near to where London Bridge is today.

  The demolition of Old London Bridge in 1831 also had an effect on the tidal head. For centuries its narrow arches and wide pier bases had blocked the flow of water and held back enough of the tide to maintain a navigable stretch along the entire tidal Thames, but when it was removed water levels at Teddington dropped by thirty inches and the river was reduced to a mere stream running between mudbanks. Cricket matches were held on the riverbed. On Wednesday 25 June 1884, the Globe reported on a picnic that was held just downstream from Teddington Lock: ‘It has been reserved for this generation to dine where the Thames ought to be … spreading their cloth on the bed of the river and drinking “Prosperity to the new lock, which is, or is not to be. That is the question.”’ Richmond Weir and Lock was opened in 1894 to counteract this effect and to maintain the water levels between Richmond and Teddington at half tide or above to ensure the river remained navigable.

  It is still in use, and every autumn it is left open for about three weeks while the locks and weir at Teddington stay closed, in what is known as the annual Thames Draw Off. This allows the stretch of water between them to rise and fall naturally with the tides, and when the tide is out the water falls so low that vast amounts of riverbed are exposed. For that brief period, it becomes the only part of the tidal Thames where, in places, you can walk from the north (Middlesex) shore to the south (Surrey) shore without getting your feet wet. While the lock is lifted, essential maintenance takes place, environmental surveys can be conducted on the riverbed, local action groups can clear the river of rubbish, and mudlarks can mooch around a unique part of the foreshore.

  The best and most fruitful spots to mudlark on the Thames are those where there has been intense human activity over a long period of time and where busy river traffic churns up the foreshore and erodes the compacted mud that contains the river’s treasures. I have never found that much west of Vauxhall, but when I read about the annual draw off, I decided I had to see it for myself. Just once, in any case. It was the photographs that had really captured my attention: pictures of the naked riverbed with stranded boats leaning precariously to one side and people wandering around at will on the dry riverbed. Perhaps the river this far west had something to offer after all.

  Draw-off days are always at the end of October and early November when damp mists hang over the water mingling with the smell of burning leaves. During the first week locals descend on the newly exposed riverbed to collect the casual losses and lucky pennies tossed in the previous year. Families pick their way through the shingle and mud, heads down, plastic bags in hand, exploring the newly unfamiliar, wondering at the river’s-eye view. It was this that I had in mind as I began my walk from Richmond Bridge one chilly afternoon in November a few years ago.

  I chose to follow the riverside path along the Middlesex side of the river and continue over the bridge, turning hard left down a road that leads to a slipway. From here I joined a tarmac path that was edged with sludgy leaves and gritty mud and set my pace for the long walk to Teddington. I’d worked out my route the night before and knew I had quite a distance to cover, so I’d decided to wear walking boots instead of wellingtons, which are uncomfortable over long distances. I just hoped I wouldn’t need them. The pictures I’d seen didn’t show much mud, but I didn’t want to be walking back with it squelching through the lace holes in my boots as I’ve done after other visits to the foreshore.

  Everything was leisurely upstream. I passed a few people, but not many: women pushing buggies with babies bundled up against the cold ambled in contented pairs; joggers apologised as they bounced past. This is the part of the river where people relax and play on the water. There are motorboats, narrowboats and barges turned into houseboats along the banks. In the summer you can hire traditional Thames skiffs here, with old-fashioned names like Linda and Violet painted on the back seat. Even the river is calmer and slower than it is in central London and the Estuary. It lacks the pace and ferocity it acquires as it flows through the city and away to the sea. And to me that is what is missing.

  But there was no denying it was beautiful. Willow trees clung to the bank and ancient plane trees lined the other side of the path. There was a scent of earth, rotting leaves and river mud, and birds were everywhere. A group of ducks were sitting fluffed up and huddled on some steps that led to the river and two Canada geese eyed me warily from the bank nearby. Gulls and cormorants flew past, a reminder that I was just over sixty miles from the pier at Southend-on-Sea. Blackbirds rustled in the bushes beside the path and for a time a robin kept pace with me, reappearing now and then and fixing me with his bead-like eye. My great-aunt once told me that robins are the souls of the departed: this is why they come so close and their company feels so intimate. They are the people you once knew visiting from beyond, coming to say hello, and I always say hello back because you never know who they might be. Perhaps my great-aunt herself.

  Only the regular roar of planes descending into Heathrow Airport reminded me that I was still in London. But if I ignored that, I could very well have been walking along a country lane back near the farm where I grew up in the 1970s and 80s: 300 acres of heavy Weald clay, 120 milking cows, a collection of old barns and a lopsided farmhouse built in the reign of Henry VIII, all nestled in a green valley at the end of a long concrete road.

  A small river ran through the farm and skirted the back of the house, a large ash tree shading its water in the summer and a single willow reaching into its shallows. With my two much older brothers away at boarding school and in the absence of neighbours, the farm dog and the river were my playmates. While the dog chased ducks and swam around in circles, I spent hours fishing with nets tied to long bamboo canes for the tiny fish and water snails that sheltered in the weeds near the bank. I lay in the long grass and watched dragonflies dart and hover among the reeds, dipping their tails into the water to lay their eggs. If I stayed still long enough, I saw water voles emerge fro
m their riverbank burrows at dusk and very occasionally a grass snake twisting silently through the water, its tiny head held proud, forked tongue flicking.

  The river flowed from east to west through the middle of the farm and I knew every inch of it: the bends that caught rubbish, sometimes a football and once even an escaped battered rowing boat. I knew the deep bits to avoid and where it was shallow enough to wade across from one side to the other without flooding my wellington boots. I knew where the sticklebacks hid in the weeds, where ducks nested, and how to get into the low space under the concrete bridge where I listened to our cows patiently shuffling back to pasture after being milked. I learned to love rivers on the farm and they have proved to be my most enduring passion.

  There are no walls or barriers on the river path at Teddington. For much of my route the riverbank was natural, sloping down to the river at an angle created by the water rather than by man, and the river was right next to me. If I had wanted, I could have stepped off the path, crossed a few feet of dead weeds and grass and dropped right into the water. The brittle stems of dead nettles pushed through the yellowing grass and every so often I passed a wide short set of concrete steps set into the bank. Rowing clubs have their clubhouses along this stretch and I assumed this was where they launched their boats.

  I passed an eyot, otherwise known as an ‘ait’ from the Old English īgeth, based on īeg meaning ‘island’. This is Glover’s Island, named after a waterman called Joseph Glover who paid £70 (around £4,400 in today’s money) for it in 1872 and caused a scandal by putting it up for sale twenty-three years later for £5,000 (around £410,000). It was eventually sold in 1900 for an undisclosed sum to a local resident and gifted to the council. It is one of three eyots between Richmond Bridge and Teddington Lock and one of nine on the upper reaches of the tidal Thames. Eyots characterise this part of the river. These mudbanks and slices of land have been carved away from the mainland, deposited by the river and sculpted into long blunt strips and teardrops by the flow of the water. Most of them are uninhabited, wild and overgrown, covered with dense scrub and willow trees that reach down into the water to dabble in the currents.