Why we treasure-hunters seek the debris of past generations

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is author of ‘Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames’ and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries

Last week, I spent five consecutive hours, mostly on my knees, staring at the mud. My fingers froze, my back seized up, my boots were swamped in the freezing wake from a passing boat and all I found was a button -but it was treasure.

I am a mudlark, and it seems I am not alone. Figures released this week by the British Museum show there were a record 1,378 items of treasure found by amateur enthusiasts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2022. I have been searching the Thames foreshore at low tide for over 20 years, and I don’t think I have ever returned without an object that is, however humble, both wonderful and unusual.

It is the thrill of the hunt that keeps me — and fellow treasure-hunters — coming back for more. The same excited wriggle in my belly that I felt as a child when I pushed my fingers through the sawdust in a lucky-dip bucket. I knew the prize wouldn’t really be very good, but I didn’t care. I handed over my precious pennies for the excitement of what could be.

These days, it is this quest for what could be that gets me out of bed at 4am on a cold dark morning. The Thames is my lucky dip and the prizes I seek are the castoffs and losses of generations, and along with them their forgotten stories. 

Bending down and picking up an object that hasn’t been touched since its original owner dropped it is like reaching back to shake hands with history. It is the closest thing I can imagine to time travel, and it is addictive. Every tide turns another page in this giant history book and I need to be there to read the stories that are revealed. 

The practice of mudlarking takes time, patience and equal measures of knowledge and sheer luck. The most beautiful hammered coins have been delivered to me on waves that would have washed them away again had I not been standing right where I was at that precise moment. The gold minute hand of a Victorian pocket watch would have gone unnoticed had I not been kneeling so close to the mud, and freshly eroded Tudor shoes and centuries-old wooden combs would have been destroyed by the river had I not found them in time. 

I’m sure I’d find a lot more if I used a metal detector and scraped away at the surface of the riverbed, but I don’t like to leave any trace of myself or upset the foreshore’s fragility. My philosophy is simple: I let the river decide what treasures it offers up, and the river has been generous. While my finds are mostly quite modest — a sherd of medieval pottery, a Georgian clay pipe, a handmade Tudor dress pin — I occasionally hit the jackpot. 

A couple of years ago, I found a freshly eroded 16th century sword. It was my Excalibur moment and I held it aloft as I looked around for someone to share the moment with, but it was cold and windy and the foreshore was deserted, so I celebrated alone. I’m used to sharing these moments with myself and I prefer it that way. Bringing an object back into the world after so many hidden years is intense and private.

It has been a slow start to 2024. The best things I have found so far have been half a Roman hairpin, a decorated Victorian clay marble, a plain 17th century bone knife handle and the top of a Georgian sugar shaker. But sometimes it is the simplest objects that tell the most detailed stories.

The button had popped off a pair of Victorian trousers sold by a Jewish tailor called Henry (Hyam) Alvarez whose mother was just 12 years old when he was born in a tenement in Spitalfields. He ran a successful clothing shop at Victoria Dock Road in Canning Town. The rows of terraced houses where his customers lived and the iron works and coal yards where they worked, along with Henry’s shop, are gone. But the button brings them briefly back to life again — and that is why I search.