Review: Secrets Of The Thames Is A Treasure Of An Exhibition

If one of mudlarking's great joys is the frisson of finding little marvels glinting in the sunlight, then London Museum Dockland's exhibition captures it marvellously.

Revelation after revelation comes at you from the glass cases at Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London's Lost Treasures. Each object makes you feel a sliver of what the beach combers who originally found them must've felt. A prosthetic eye from the 1920s would have given its mudlarker one hell of a start when they saw it glaring back up at them from the silt. Who knows what went through the head of whoever plucked a 200-year-old giant green Chinese cock from the foreshore. And no, I don't mean a chicken.

Replicas are planted here and there (including a tactile station where you can feel up bulbous shards of Roman amphora) but the real McCoys will have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief. A wooden three-pint tankard that's many centuries old seems too cartoonish to be true. The Waterloo Helmet — a great dulled bronze headpiece with two horn protruding from it — surely belongs on the bonce of some voluptuous singer at the ENO, but no — it's an immaculate Iron Age find, dredged up by Victorian workers (let's hope they were paid a bonus that day).

Elsewhere, the forgeries are the star; take the 'Shadwell Shams', fantastical figurines so skilfully crafted by two enterprising mudlarks that experts declared them authentic. Some 12,000 of these 'Billy and Charleys' were made before the cunning culprits were rumbled.

Human stories like this are everywhere, from Henry Mayhew's profile of a young mudlarker who collected finds in his hat, through to the coal barge workers who used to take pity on hard-up mudlarkers, by kicking lumps of coal overboard for them to scoop up.

The curation is considered; as you work your way around floors piled with flotsam and jetsam — Tom Chivers' river recordings swilling around your cochleas — there is no definitive route. Exploration and deviation is encouraged. Billy Bond's 'Finder Keepers' is a series of maquettes of mudlarkers — their heads swapped out for significant objects they've found — which you're then told to look out for elsewhere in the exhibition. There's a sense of adventure.

Some tchotchkes aren't objects at all, but ingots of trivia. Did you know that the Thames has been a sacred Hindu river since 1970, when it was blessed by Yogiji Maharaj? Or that some 19th century mudlarkers were making the equivalent of £200k in today's money (though most were broke)?

Ten, 15 years ago, Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London's Lost Treasures might've been a relatively niche show, but happily mudlarking is now a major pastime for many Londoners and visitors to the city — so much so, the waitlist for annual foreshore permits has surpassed 10,000, and been put on indefinite pause. Figures like Lara Maiklem and Johnny Mudlark form a kind of foreshore glitterati — further romanticising the concept of trudging down a beach in the early hours of a mizzly Sunday morning. This mudlarking lark isn't merely about hunting for real life treasure though — but piecing together fragments of the city's past.

It isn't going too far to say that mudlarking has recently done as much for stoking interest in London's history, as many of the city's illustrious institutions have.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the show's denouement, one of Luke Jerram's phosphorescent Moon sculptures. In one way, it's a fitting wide-shot of the celestial orb which has swept countless lost treasures up from their watery graves, and back to the feet of curious Londoners. In another, these sculptures are now ten a penny, the cultural equivalent of finding a broken clay pipe on the beach.

Come to think of it, I didn't see a single clay pipe in there. No doubt, if I went around again I'd find one, alongside a tranche of treasures I didn't spot on my first comb. Such is the addictive nature of mudlarking.

Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London's Lost Treasures, London Museum Docklands, 4 April 2025-1 March 2026.

All images: Londonist