Review of “Mudlark'd: Hidden Histories from the River Thames” by Malcolm Russell, published by Thames & Hudson
Book published by Thames & Hudson, 2022
Review published in Country Life
This is a book inspired by the joy of holding a fragment of the past in your hand, of a find being passed around a group of friends, and of the stories that are unleashed. It is a conscious reaction against hands-off text-book history, always taught, never experienced.
As a Mudlark you are turning over wet stones embedded in slimy mud constantly churned over by the tide-worked banks of the Thames. This river has served as one of the great highways of international trade but also as a common sewer. It is one of the joys of being a mudlark that you are not trespassing on the jealously preserved (and beautifully analysed layers) of an archaeological dig, but rummaging around in one of the last great common spaces of England (its tidal shore) and not so much stealing buried treasure as sifting over rubbish that has been dumped.
The broken stems of tobacco pipes are the easiest thing to find and first identify and have no more value than yesterday’s cigarette butt. Malcolm Russell uses these worthless fragments to take us on a journey of historical imagination. Back to the first trading links with native Americans, whose tobacco culture would provide the Spanish with cigars and pipes to the English. We also follow bent coins into the bedrooms of lovers, while fragments of Roman pottery, lumps of sea coal, and fragments of late medieval German salt glaze pottery open up flickering avenues to other storylines.
The stories are sometimes highly selective, with an almost whimsical connection to a found object, but with an ear out for the margins of society, be they snappily dressed costermongers, the shifting patterns of gender as well as the first mountebank public performance dentists and sex trade workers. We listen out for the arrival of immigrants, be they the powerful Hanse merchants of the Baltic, Huguenot refugees or Lascar sailors, who all bring new skills.
The book is itself a thing of beauty, packed full of handsome illustrations and the foreshore photographs of Mathew Williams-Ellis that help us take off on flights of fancy from a handful of rusty old buttons and pottery sherds.
“It is one of the joys of being a mudlark that you are not trespassing on the jealously-preserved layers of an archaeological dig, but rummaging around in one of the last great common spaces of England - the tidal shore.”