I’ve always been a museophile.
Growing up in New Zealand, museums transported me to exotic places and different eras. When I started traveling, I always included museums in my itinerary, and in 2014 I visited the Getty Villa. It was an amazing experience; the Villa recreates what I’d only seen as ruins and fragments while in Rome and other parts of Italy.
Wanting a change in lifestyle, I relocated to London where I had lots of time to visit museums. I’d heard of a curious activity called mudlarking—scouring the Thames’s foreshore at low tide for interesting objects. The Thames is a strange river. Originally a wide braided waterway, it’s been cinched into a third of its original width. Street level can be up to thirty feet above the foreshore, the debris of 2,000 years of habitation held back behind massive embankments.
The Thames is tidal, so it drops by as much as twenty feet twice a day. The exposed foreshore is covered with fragments—glass, pottery, masonry, bone—that correspond to every era imaginable: Roman, medieval, Tudor, Victorian. I particularly like pottery and porcelain.
I take my sherds home and clean them, and once they’re dry, it’s easier to identify clues such as glazing and decoration. The broken edges reveal a cross section to study thickness, color, and inclusions within the clay. Convex or concave fragments can suggest form; the gentle slope of a medieval bowl, the hard shoulder of a German earthenware bottle.
Contemplating how fragments end up in the Thames is as interesting as finding them. For the majority of human settlement, the river was a dumping ground, but it also received religious offerings, absorbed the debris of catastrophic events (the Great Fire, the Blitz), and at various times its banks have been occupied by forts, theaters, pottery kilns, and palaces. The detritus from all this activity has disintegrated and ended up in the Thames.
Kirsten Lew’s article “Putting the Pieces Together” would resonate with any mudlarker. We value and appreciate fragments, study them intently, and wonder about their origin. The vast ceramic collection of the V&A is a great resource for me to compare fragments against more complete examples. I’ve also stood in front of glass cases crammed with artifacts at the British Museum, and later pulled from the mud pieces of those same kinds of artifacts.
The term "mudlark" dates to Victorian times, when the poor would search the foreshore for anything useful or valuable, darting around like mudlark birds. While our modern circumstances are more fortunate, the public still observes us with curiosity. Most Londoners regard the Thames as toxic (it’s not), and upon seeing our finds, their reactions range from fascination to bewilderment.
Mudlarking is a personal pastime that allows me to contemplate history in an incredibly intimate way. I’ve discovered, identified, and kept in my own collection the same kinds of items that reside in the collections of the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, and the Getty Museum. My fragments connect me with some very happy times visiting museums.
