Mudlarking
May. 20th, 2025 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo If I lived in London (perish the thought) and not too far from the river I might think of being a mudlark.
Mudlarks are people who scour the foreshore looking for stuff. You need a licence. Historically mudlarks were very poor people- kids mainly- who scraped a living by selling the stuff they found. Todays mudlarks are artists and antiquarians. It's very unlikely they'll find anything of value but the possibility is always there. Mostly they find things of interest, things they can research- and the odd item that's a real puzzle.
I've been watching Nicola White's YouTube channel. She finds coins (O the thrill of an Irish penny from the 1980s) lots of clay pipes, ancient bottles, the occasional thing- a Barbie stuck full of pins- that might be a hex, and fragments of this and that. Then she takes them back to her studio, cleans them up and tells us what she's found out about them. Stories from the past. I find it all very soothing. It purls along like the river itself. Did you know that the Thames foreshore is the single largest archaeological site in Britain? Or maybe it's in Europe. Anyway it's very big.
Nicola teaches, without doing it overtly, that there's no such thing as junk. A bit of a broken plate: how it shines in the mud, O look at that stripe of ochre! How pretty the pattern is! Take it home. Turn it into art!
Mudlarks are people who scour the foreshore looking for stuff. You need a licence. Historically mudlarks were very poor people- kids mainly- who scraped a living by selling the stuff they found. Todays mudlarks are artists and antiquarians. It's very unlikely they'll find anything of value but the possibility is always there. Mostly they find things of interest, things they can research- and the odd item that's a real puzzle.
I've been watching Nicola White's YouTube channel. She finds coins (O the thrill of an Irish penny from the 1980s) lots of clay pipes, ancient bottles, the occasional thing- a Barbie stuck full of pins- that might be a hex, and fragments of this and that. Then she takes them back to her studio, cleans them up and tells us what she's found out about them. Stories from the past. I find it all very soothing. It purls along like the river itself. Did you know that the Thames foreshore is the single largest archaeological site in Britain? Or maybe it's in Europe. Anyway it's very big.
Nicola teaches, without doing it overtly, that there's no such thing as junk. A bit of a broken plate: how it shines in the mud, O look at that stripe of ochre! How pretty the pattern is! Take it home. Turn it into art!
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Date: 2025-05-20 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-21 10:09 am (UTC)