A river of lost souls: the extraordinary secrets of the Thames

If you spend enough time on the Thames, you will eventually come across human remains. It is a river of lost souls, filled with suicides, battles, burials, murders and accidents, with people so poor their families couldn’t afford to bury them, or so destitute they were never missed. Their bones wash up on the foreshore in the drifts of smooth, honey-brown animal bones, the remains of 2,000 years of dining and feasting.

I know this because I am a mudlark and I’ve found my fair share of lost and forgotten Londoners. Mudlarking is best described as a hobby for the archaeologically curious. Twice a day, the tidal Thames falls low enough to search the riverbed for the city’s lost and discarded objects. I let the river dictate what I find; I don’t dig or use a metal detector, I merely take what is left for me on the surface of the mud and caught among the shingle. It is a giant lucky dip, with each tide delivering new treasures and random objects.

In the 15 years I’ve been chasing the tides, I’ve found countless coins and buttons, Roman hairpins, a complete Iron Age pot, medieval buckles, Tudor shoes, Georgian wine bottles and modern wedding rings, but the most sobering are the human finds. A handful of teeth, eaten away by rot, and a dirty creamy-yellow cup, a section of human skull with faint grooves and ridges on the inside where someone’s brain once pressed against it.

Pink rubber gloves, old coats packed with sand, and bedraggled wigs have all stopped me in my tracks over the years, but the grey plastic brick I once found seemed innocent enough, until I picked it up. It was heavier than I expected and when I shook it, it sounded like gravel mixed with sand. I turned it over and saw just enough of a soggy white label to read: ‘Remains of the Late…’ I had found someone’s ashes.