Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Life of Letters, a podcast exploring the history and future of calligraphy, handwriting, type design and all things lettering. Join me, Laura Edrilyn, a London based calligrapher with a curious mind, as I connect with artists, historians, stationary experts and more from around the world to uncover the stories behind the letters and the journeys of those who bring them to life.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: In today's episode, I'm delighted to be speaking with Jason Sandy. Jason is an American architect and property developer in London and is a member of the exclusive society of Thames Mudlarks. Sounds like a secret society, doesn't it? His mudlarking adventures have been featured on television and in magazines worldwide, with collections exhibited in the British Museum, Tate Modern and other cultural institutions.
Jason also lectures about mudlarking in schools, universities and organizations.
Jason, firstly, a very huge welcome to the Life of Letters podcast. And secondly, thank you for being our first in person episode of the podcast.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for inviting me to participate.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: So we couldn't resist, obviously coming to your office not only to record it in person, but also to see some of the incredible artifacts that you've mudlarked. If that's a word, that is. It is a word, yes.
So believe it or not, it's. It's only in recent years that I've kind of heard of mudlarking.
So I just thought, let's start right at the beginning. For anyone else who might not know, can you tell us exactly what mudlarking is?
[00:01:35] Speaker C: Okay, so in London, the tide goes out twice a day, goes and fluctuates between 7 and 10 meters twice a day, which reveals a huge area of the foreshore. So the riverbed is exposed at low tide. And it's the longest and largest archaeological site in Britain at low tide only. So for a few hours per day, this whole expanse of London just appears magically as the tide recedes, and then as the tide comes back in, then it disappears. So it's quite magical and it's very specific to London and other coastal cities around Britain.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Wow. Okay, so. So there's a sort of magical moment, but only at certain times of the day. And then it. I guess because the tide is moving things around, actually you don't know what you're going to discover next. So you could go back to the same site and there could be something else there.
[00:02:29] Speaker C: Exactly. So central London is roughly 2000 years old. So the Romans arrived in 43 AD and they set up shop here. It was an early trading post, very small at the beginning, but then blossomed into the capital city.
They left around 426 A.D, so about 400 years they were active in London.
So we have 2,000 years of history that have just made its way into the River Thames.
And the Thames has always been the rubbish bin of London. So anything you wanted to get rid of and things were lost in the river. And that's what we're searching for at low tide is anything of interest that's been dropped or discarded in the river over the past 2,000 years.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: So really another person's rubbish is really somebody else's treasure.
Just a long expansion.
So how did you get into mudlarking yourself?
[00:03:22] Speaker C: So you and I both come from the same area of London, so we're both from Chiswick, which is in West London. And I moved here, you can tell from my accent, and not originally from Britain, but now I am a British citizen, have a British passport, even though my accent doesn't sound like that.
So we moved here in 2007. My wife chose Chiswick, Jim, just because a friend had lived there previously and she heard it was really nice. And we didn't know that the river was literally like two minutes away. So by pure chance I moved next to the river and my children, when they were small, we used to go down and look for small, like animals. So there's a lot of crabs along the riverbed. There's little eels, large eels as well. If you turn over rock, you can find shrimp and other little urchins moving around. So my kids are always fascinated by the wildlife along the river. So I was watching a show on the National Geographic Channel called Thames Treasure Hunters and they showed and followed the mudlarks around London, kind of showing them what could be found. And I was like, oh my goodness. I lived in London for four years along the river and I did not realize as you can find 2000 year old artifacts.
So the next day I went out and I found my first tobacco clay pipe, which are kind of white objects which on a dark background are quite easy to spot. And I was very fascinated because originally I'm from Virginia, colonial Virginia, and Jamestown was the first permanent settlement in the New World, founded by the Brits back in 1606 is when the first boats arrived and they sailed from London. So instantly I had a magical connection with all the tobacco growers in Virginia, where I was from.
That used to be they used to smoke that tobacco in this clay pipe. So 300 year old clay pipe and a tangible connection with colonial Virginia, where the tobacco had come from.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: Magical.
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:05:21] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:05:22] Speaker B: So that was your first find and then did you? Sort of.
I mean, is that unusual that you would find something immediately the first time you go mud blocking, or is that really common? Like, there's so much stuff out there, anyone could just walk along and find it.
[00:05:36] Speaker C: Yeah. So you're guaranteed to find part of a clay pipe. It might not be the bowl, but you'll definitely find a clay pipe stem. They look like white straws on the foreshore in some areas. They're literally littered everywhere. Like, you can't even step without stepping on one. That's how many people used to smoke back then.
So they're the cigarette butts of their time period. But they never disintegrate or. Yeah, decompose. So that's why there's so many on the riverbed.
So it's a part of London that most people don't even know about or are aware that you can go down there. You feel like you're trespassing the first time you go down, and most of the time you're alone. There's only a few places where there's a lot of people.
So it's very tranquil and serene and we'll probably talk about this a little bit later, but for mental health, it's a great place to escape from London, the hustle and bustle, and just find peace and tranquility.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: It makes me want to immediately go. It's a very. It's a very.
I don't know. Yeah, it sounds like it just.
It creates this sort of magical world that we don't see, you know, these pockets of London. But it's a snapshot of history. And it could be from literally any time. Yes, to some extent. Right.
It must be throwing up things all the time. And I. I guess takes somebody with an interest in history to kind of start to decipher. Right. This is obviously glass, or this is clay, or this is sort of different materials coming up, different objects.
And if you don't know anything, you. You're probably kind of walking around things that could be of interest, right?
[00:07:15] Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah. You have to kind of, as they say, get your eye in.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:07:19] Speaker C: So when I first started mudlarking, I didn't know really what I was looking for or what anything was really. So I used to troll through, like, Facebook sites and there's other websites of other former mudlarks that used to kind of post their finds. So I spent hours and hours and hours just looking at what they had found. And then I kind of trained my eye to look for those same things.
And then you just kind of Become more aware of what's around. And now they're quite easy to spot, just because you know exactly what you're looking for and what shapes to look for.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: Fascinating. So you mentioned, you know, obviously if you go down there on your own, it's quite a solo activity.
But are there groups of people who do go out? Are there like you? I think there's the Society of Thames Mudlarks. Is that the official group of London that can go out and do it? Do you need to be led, you know, have a guide or any rules in place for how you mudlark?
[00:08:13] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's a really nice community here in London. We all share a common passion and hobby and a lot of times I don't even know what my friends do in their real day jobs because we just talk about mudlarking the whole time and, like, what's your latest find? And, oh, that's amazing. Did you hear this backstory about this historic object? So we just have this common fascination and I know nothing about them except for what they found last week and what they found previously. So that's quite exciting. But to go mudlarking in London, you have to have a permit from the Port of London Authority, and they've recently capped it to 4,000 mudlarks total.
So there's only 4,000 people that have a license to go mudlarking in London and they recently restricted it so that no foreigners are allowed to go mudlarking unless it's on a tour group.
So they do offer guided tours and I'm one of the tour guides with the Thames Explorer Trust.
And it's quite exciting because that gives the chance for anyone, any member of the public to go and find archaeology for themselves.
So that's the beauty of mudlarking is it's archaeology for everyone. It's not just for the wealthy or the well educated or people that have a degree in archaeology. It really is. Anybody can go down there if you have a permit or, or are on a book tour and find something historic for yourself.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Incredible. Are there, like, hot spots? Are there, like, certain areas where you're like, right, there's going to be some good stuff coming up here, or are there areas that you're like, nothing ever happens, you know, no artifacts ever come up there?
[00:09:52] Speaker C: Yeah. Yes. So there are hotspots. So what we're looking at, and we do a lot of research before we go down there, is where the oldest part of the civilization was and also where are the hotspots, where are people getting in and out of Boats where or where the dock workers are very active along the river, because there you have a higher chance of people dropping things or discarding things. So in some of the docks, that's where we find a load of clay pipes. Just because we know all the dock workers smoked and single use pipes, they would just chuck them in after they would smoke them one time.
Other locations, you know, that was a ferry crossing. You know, people are losing buttons or their cufflinks or a buckle or the coin that they're going to pay the ferryman. So you always look in those spots as well.
So Central London is really the hot spot, and especially the north bank, because even if you look at the Tube map today, most of the tube lines, except for the Jubilee Line, are all on the north side of the river. And historically, that's where the Romans were located, between Ludgate Hill and Cornhill. So in the square mile of London, and that's really the hot spot. The Roman, the medieval, all of that stuff comes up from the north side. And that's why it's heav. Totally restricted. So if you have a standard permit holder, or. Sorry, if you have a standard permit, you're only allowed to search by eye along the north bank between Westminster and Whopping. So that's a very long stretch of the river, because the museum wants you to prove that you're a very respectable person and that you record the things that you find that are of historical interest. So anything 300 years or older, you have to report to the Museum of London, who then records it on the British Museum's Portable Antiquity Scheme.
But because I'm a member of the Society of Thames Mudlarks, we have exclusive rights to dig and metal detect on the north side and use trowels or any other device, whereas standard permit holders are not allowed to. So we can disturb the surface and go deeper to find the really good stuff. And we've been vetted and proven to be respectable people and therefore we've been recording with the museum. I've done it for over 13 years now and they've taught me how to record my own finds. So we've proven ourselves and that's why we have special permission. And there's only 50 of us out of the 4,000 that have those special rights.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:12:19] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: It's like an honorary degree, really.
[00:12:22] Speaker C: It is.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: It's like you've worked backwards, you've proved yourself, now we'll teach you everything.
So that kind of answers something I was going to ask around. If people have found something when they're mud larking.
What do they need to do? You mentioned that if it's older than 3,000 years.
[00:12:42] Speaker C: 300 years.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: 300 years.
So it's older than 300 years. They need to go through the museum and report it. But do they give it to the museum? Do they keep it? Does it need to go in a special safe somewhere?
[00:12:58] Speaker C: Very good question.
So the Museum of London has over 7.5 million artifacts.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:13:04] Speaker C: So they're generally not interested in any of the rubbish that we find in the river. It has to be something quite extraordinary before they ask for a donation. Right. So that's every mudlark's dream, is to donate something. And especially if it goes on permanent display in the museum. That's like ultimate good mudlark and gold.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:13:22] Speaker C: Normally that doesn't happen.
They take about five to ten things to record. And you, you have, I would say, meeting with them twice a year. So you just kind of save up your stuff and then you go to the museum, you meet with the fines liaison officer, you show them what you found and then they choose what they'd like to record and then you get that back in three months or six months time.
Yeah. So that's also really good. So it's a win win situation. The museum gets to see pretty much everything of interest that comes off the foreshore.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:53] Speaker C: And we get to find out exactly what it is. So there's a lot of mystery objects that we find and we have no clue. But they have such a good working knowledge of the finds and archaeology and the artifacts found, they can identify things for us. And then when it goes officially on the British Museum's website, that's also very cool to know that. Oh, look what I found. And it's actually on the British Museum's website.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: Incredible. Okay, so the obvious question, have you ever had anything that's gone into the museum?
[00:14:24] Speaker C: Yes. Fortunately, I've donated three things to the museum. Now, my favorite piece is a Roman bone hairpin. It's the face of a woman staring up at me and it's carved out of bone and they've dated it between 43 and 100 AD. So that's really the very beginning of Roman Londinium.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: So nearly 2,000 years old. And that's now on permanent display in the museum.
And it's great to see it in the display case.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Did you know that's what you'd found?
[00:14:58] Speaker C: No, I thought it was medieval and I had to do some research when I went home and I was very thrilled when I found out that it's Roman and also that it's that old and very significant. It's one of the only ones in London found with a face carved into it.
And that's why it's now on permanent display in the museum. And then my last one that I've given to them, it's a medieval child shoe that they asked for a donation. Even has a shoestring still attached.
And we have an exhibition which starts next week, and it's going on display in the major new exhibition, and they've restored it for me. So obviously, leather normally disintegrates quite quickly. Yeah. But because the river mud is anaerobic, which means no oxygen, things, things like timber, bone and leather, they don't decompose. They just survive for hundreds of years in the river mud. And then when we pull them out, it's literally something that you normally wouldn't find in a field, because in fields, things get hit by the plow or turned over and oxygen gets to them. Whereas the London Thames mud is anaerobic, and it encapsulates these objects and perfectly preserved scent.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:16:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: I feel like that should have jogged a memory in my archaeological degree, but it hasn't. So it shows how long ago that I've learned any of this stuff.
Can I ask you if there's been any kind of favorite finds? If you've got anything to show us, perhaps.
[00:16:34] Speaker C: So with me today, I brought a little bit of a treasure chest of different artifacts that I have found in the Thames.
Maybe I'll start with just one of my favorite old finds, please. And this is from two years ago. And I still thought, it can't be real because it is in such good condition, allowed to touch it. This is a Roman coin from Emperor Hadrian. And that's Hadrian, who's famous for Hadrian's Wall.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:17:01] Speaker C: And yeah, so I think it's around 2nd century B80, which is quite incredible that it's that old and in such good condition.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: Condition and about the size of a penny, maybe smaller, maybe closer to a 5p. So teeny tiny. But you spotted that in the mud, or was it kind of with other money, with other coins?
[00:17:24] Speaker C: No, this was alone. And it's actually a silver denarius.
So it's worth quite a bit of money as well. It's like. So that's one of the smaller Roman coins that I found. This is one of the largest Roman coins coins that I found. And this is from Emperor Diocletian.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:17:43] Speaker C: And it's quite a quite A big one. And that, that you can see it's made of bronze. Whereas this other one that we just had, that's made of silver. And that's why that one's so shiny in comparison with the other one we just.
I'm showing you.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:17:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: And can you read? You don't. Is it easy to know what it says on them?
[00:18:02] Speaker C: So Roman coins are notoriously difficult, but they hopefully put the emperor's name on there. So here you can read quite easily. Hadrian.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: And on this one you can read Diocletian.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: I mean, you say easily. Well, I mean, yeah, to the mudlarkers eye.
[00:18:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:18:19] Speaker C: So the thrill of mudlarking is that tangible connection with history.
And when I picked this out of the mud, I was the first person in 2000 years, well, 1800 years to actually hold this coin. And the last person to touch it was a Roman person living in London at that time.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: That's incredible.
[00:18:39] Speaker C: Yeah. So another one of my favorite finds is this token which if you look at the date, can you tell me what happened on that in that year?
[00:18:51] Speaker B: 66. 1666 is the battle a fire of London.
Oh my goodness.
[00:19:04] Speaker C: Okay, so great fire of London, 1666, Pudding Lane.
And I found this not too far down the hill from where Pudding Lane is.
So this might have been lost as somebody was escaping from the great fire. And as you know, they were getting in boats to cross the Thames because that was the safest way to escape the flames.
And that part of the city was completely burnt to the ground.
And a lot of these businesses, their records disintegrated or burnt in the fire. And these tokens are some of the only evidence that people have of these businesses that existed along the river. This one's interesting because it's actually from Devon.
So it gives the name of the town in Devon and it says the name of the trader, which is Henry Hopping, and it says that he was a carrier. And if you look closely, it's got a horse. Horse.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:55] Speaker C: It's not just any horse, it's a packed horse.
So they bring supplies or transport supplies back and forth.
So I think it could be from sometime after the great fire when they were rebuilding the city after the everything was destroyed. So this person had traveled all the way from Devon bringing building materials to London to help reconstruct the city.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Oh my goodness.
[00:20:19] Speaker C: I mean there's no way to prove that. But the fact that it's not from London.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: From that time period, 1666 is. And has a packed horse and the guy was definitely in the transportation business back then.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: And the location of where you found it as well. How. What.
This is probably another silly question, but why is this a token and not a coin? As in, obviously coins need to come through a different system. But.
Yeah. How did you know that this was a coin?
[00:20:53] Speaker C: Good question. Yeah. So back at that time period, this is right after or very end of the Commonwealth period. And during the Commonwealth, they didn't make a small denomination coinage. There were no copper coins, there were only silver coins. So if you wanted to buy like basic necessity, like eggs, milk, loaf of bread, whatever, you didn't have any small change to buy those things because the silver coins were worth too much.
So individual traders started making their own coinage, which was officially recognized between 1649 and 1672.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:21:29] Speaker C: So that's kind of middle of that time period. And so individual traders had their own coins, like these here.
I've got a few more here. And they came in different denominations. So this one is a half penny. So if you see it says his half penny. Yeah. And then you have farthings, which are the smaller ones and slightly larger, the full pennies, which I've never found a full penny before. So traders used to use this as common currency for small purchases.
And then you could redeem that and get a real coin back if you wanted to.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:04] Speaker C: But these were in general circulation because everybody just needed small coinage. Nobody was rich enough to carry around silver coins.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Do you know how they were made?
[00:22:14] Speaker C: So they're struck so they would put like it's copper and brass. They would put blank discs in between two die and then whack it with a hammer to put the impression on both sides of it. And some of these were even minted in the Tower of London. They used to have a mint within the Tower of London. So even though it was an official governmental currency, they were actually officially issued by different traders.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: Incredible. Incredible.
[00:22:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: They've got such detail on though the, the sort of the words. Literally each of those letters have been created and there's almost a very similar way in which they've been created. So there was obviously in sort of standard format.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Even on the reverse, some of them actually give the traders initials and names.
[00:23:03] Speaker B: As I mentioned, like personalization.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Gosh.
[00:23:07] Speaker C: Let's see about this one. This one's a grocer and he put his name in cursive, which was quite unusual. And the date on there as well.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Now that's exciting.
[00:23:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Wow. So if they, they got the blank how would they have got the words written in these different types?
Right, okay. Onto something. Something metal. How would it got onto the metal? Scratch.
[00:23:35] Speaker C: So a harder metal they would have used. And then brass and copper, they're quite soft metal, so that's why you can strike these impressions in them. But this technology had been in use for several hundred years.
And this is, for instance, two silver coins from the Tudor time period.
And you can feel how thin they are. And it's the same technology, and that's why they're called hammered coins.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:01] Speaker C: And if you look closely on the other side, you can see a date. See if you can spot that date on it.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: 1571.
[00:24:10] Speaker C: Correct.
So Shakespeare's time.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: Oh, yes. Okay.
[00:24:15] Speaker C: Yeah. This one's actually been bent. And we call this a love token.
So this is around 1580.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: So scrunched up.
[00:24:25] Speaker C: Yeah. Around the same time period as when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. But just going back to what you were mentioning about the reverse and how they were made.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: So two of my favorite finds. I always love personalized vines.
And this is a seal matrix. So do you know what a seal matrix is? Okay, so if you have hot wax and you want to make an impression and put it on, like an official document.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:49] Speaker C: You'd melt the wax. You put it on your either letter or the official document, and then while it's still hot, you would impress that with a seal matrix. And this is in reverse. And you can see it here. It's a small. I thought it was a coin when I first found it, but it's actually a seal matrix.
And it says in Latin, credit mije, which means, trust me, but I'm scratching my head. Why would you stamp on an official document? Trust me, you seem like a dubious character. If you have to stamp that on an official document, that means you're up to no good.
So it's almost like a used car salesman. Trust me, it's a great deal.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: Open this.
[00:25:33] Speaker C: So another one that I found, and I found four of these now, but this is the largest one that I found. I thought it was a knife handle, and I thought the blade had snapped off, but then when I looked at the underside, it had the gothic letter K in reverse.
And this is what it looks like when you stamp it. So that's the gothic letter K.
Still fit for purpose after all of those years at the bottom of the river.
So I love these personalized artifacts that were left and lost so many years ago in the river.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Wow. How beautiful the handle. I mean, you could have just had A round end and done it. But actually, there's a lot of detail to it, even it.
[00:26:17] Speaker C: Yeah. It's got, like, a heart shape at the top, and in the middle, it's like two flower, like a tulip petals, and then you've got a burst of fire at the bottom, and then kind of a ribbed bezel around the perimeter. Yeah. But, yeah, it's got a nice weight to it as well.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: What sort of time period did you say?
[00:26:34] Speaker C: Georgian. So 300 years old.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:26:37] Speaker C: So.
So.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:26:40] Speaker C: Yeah, wow.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: And this is really a treasure trove of things. You've got rings, you've got buttons, you've got.
I don't even know what. Half of these are little. You've got a little saxophone here. Little figurines.
[00:26:53] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Skulls. Skulls that aren't real skulls, but skull beads. Okay. Buckles, like gems. And these. Are these real? Are these incredibly expensive? I should probably not be breathing near them. I feel bullets.
[00:27:10] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Else have we got? There's some broken things going on in here.
[00:27:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
Pottery. A lot of bits and bobs.
So I have one big thing to show you today, which is my new favorite find.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. Is this the latest?
[00:27:26] Speaker C: Found last year.
And normally, as you can see, most of these things are very small and they're quite dark. And this was quite interesting because I never imagined to find this in the River Thames. So it's a teapot in the Art Nouveau style, made in Germany between 1905 and 1910. And it was completely encrusted when I found it. It's already starting to tarnish again because it's plated in silver. But why would somebody throw this or discard it in the river? I mean, it's. It's such a beautiful object.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: So I presume it wasn't shiny like it is here.
[00:28:02] Speaker C: No, I had to give it a good spread.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: It was just this sort of lump of mud.
[00:28:07] Speaker C: Yeah, well, not a lump of mud. I could see the shape. So I was like. And there were other mudlarks on the foreshore. I was like, how did they miss this?
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Did you all fight over. It was a big scramble.
[00:28:15] Speaker C: No, no, they were long gone. I was like, oh, my goodness. They left this behind. It's incredible. But such a beautiful shape. And that's one of my favorite time periods in art history is Art Nouveau, because all the soft shapes and the natural inspirations. Yeah.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: Why was it there? Where? So was it. Any sign?
[00:28:34] Speaker C: Maybe it was a burglary heist or something that somebody tried to discard? Something that they had Stolen and didn't want to get caught in possession of. But this is still worth quite a few quid because it's plated in silver. And this is now highly coveted by vintage object. Yeah. Going back to one of your earlier questions, Obviously we've got 2000 years of history from the Roman times, but there were tribes living along the river much earlier than that. So I don't have any with me today. But we find a lot of flint tools as well. So like scrapers and blades, etc, made of flint that early humans would have used along the river and used.
So those are the oldest man made finds and the oldest of all finds that we discover down there are fossils. So this is an ammonite and this is between either. Well between 80 to 200 million years old.
So this is fossilized and it's actually made of metal. So as it. As these animals die, they float to the bottom, they get covered over, then that sediment becomes rock and the creature inside eventually deteriorates. But then over time, different other fluids or minerals, whatever would move into the concretions into that hollow cavity. So this is iron pyrite. So iron pyrite seeped into that cavity, filled it up completely. Then as the rock gets busted up over time, through tide and time and whatever else, and it just releases these and they don't look real. Okay, so these are some of the oldest things that we find. So very wide range of London history right before your eyes here.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. And there is one story that has fascinated me. The Dove Press typeface has been a bit of a story around West London and probably further because it's just got a fascinating history behind it. And I wondered if you could maybe tell us it in its full glory.
[00:30:34] Speaker C: Yes.
So Arts and Crafts movement, as you know, was very famous at the end of Victorian times. And Morris, William Morris lived along the Thames in Hammersmith, lived in several different houses and ended up at Kelmscott House. And there's a small museum dedicated to him still along the river near the Doves Pub. And on the other side of Doves Pub was one of William Morris's friends.
His name was T.J. cobden Sanderson. And his cottage was directly on the river. And so the Arts and Crafts movement, some of the biggest players in that movement were all located there. And they had a business partner or a good friend as well, engraver called Emory Walker. And his house is now open to the public. And you can go there. It's a small museum which is a beautiful time capsule with a lot of original William Morris tapestries, etc. So Cobden Sanderson and Emory Walker formed a partnership after William Morris died. William Morris had his own printing press, Cumberfield House, right across the street from where they were, the small alleyway. And they decided to start making their own books and printing them. So they had started out as binders for books and they bound some of William Morris's books. But they. They started out and they were against the mechanicization. I can never say that word. But the mechanization.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:32:01] Speaker C: Is that correct? It sounds good to me of type and the way that everything was machine made. So arts and crafts, it was all about doing something unique and bespoke. So they set out to make their own typeface, which they named after the pub, which is right next to Clubden Sanderson, which is called Doves Pub. So they started the Doves Press and they created the Doves type. And the punches were made up in Scotland and the typeface was brought to London. And one of the researchers of it believes that there were about 500,000 pieces of Dove's type in existence. And they made beautiful books.
And one of the most famous books was the Bible that they printed, which has a gorgeous first page. I'm not sure if you've ever seen that one, but it's called the Doves Bible.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Okay, we'll try and get.
[00:32:51] Speaker C: Recently reacquired by Emory Walker's house.
So they set up shop in 1900, but by 1906, 1907, they had fallen out and had a major dispute. So Emory Walker had many different businesses and different ventures going on, whereas Cob and Sanderson was a bit.
Had, yeah, very focused on being a perfectionist and had to have the perfect books, the perfect type face, the perfect everything.
And he didn't see Emery Walker as having that passion. And they kind of fell out because Emory Walker was kind of off doing his own thing half the time, and Cobden Sanderson was doing all the work, but not getting all of the credit for it. So they fell out. And the agreement was that Cobden Sanderson would be allowed to use the type until his death. And then upon his death, Emory Walker would be able to use the type and continue printing using the Doves typeface.
So between 1916 and 1917, Cobman Sanderson decided that he wasn't going to allow that to happen. And unbeknownst to anyone, he started secretly going to Hammersmith Bridge every evening under the COVID of darkness and discarding the type face into the river.
So he made estimated 170 trips and dumped one ton of type into the river.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:34:19] Speaker C: So that's 500,000 pieces of type have been discarded in the Hammersmith Under Hammersford Bridge. And it took about a hundred years before anybody started finding these. And Mudlarks were the first people to start finding these pieces of type. And you might may or may not know, but the IRA tried to blow up Hammersmith Bridge a few times.
And so unfortunately they had to stabilize the pier of the bridge. And so they poured a load of concrete where we think Cobden Sanderson had dumped the type. And that's why so much, so little of it has been found, because it's all under this concretion.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:56] Speaker C: But slowly, because of tide and time, they've been eroding out of that concrete and popping up. And so in total, we found over 600 pieces of the type.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:35:08] Speaker C: And Robert Green was the first person that actually found a load of it because he had help from the pla, so Port of London Authority, he commissioned them to dive down and scoop up the gravel and then sieved it and found the type. So he found 147 pieces when the PLA divers went down over two days on a very low spring tide back, I think it was 2014.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: Is he a mud locker?
[00:35:37] Speaker C: He got his permit because he found the first three pieces just by searching by eye under the bridge. And that's when he was passionate enough to employ the Port of London divers to go down and search for it. So using that, he was able to make a digital facsimile of the typeface. And now he sells out on his website called Type Spec. And so now the typeface that was once lost can be used on your computer? On my computer. So anyone in the world can now use the Doves typeface again, which is brilliant.
So Cobden Sanderson is probably rolling, I was gonna say.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:36:15] Speaker C: And because I live locally and I know where it was dumped, I go there quite often. So I found quite a few pieces of that. And I'm the first person to donate it back to Emory Walker's house. So he obviously died many years ago, but his estate now has Doves type back in their possession. Wow. And last year, for the first time ever, we had it on dispatch display within the house. And we had over 500 pieces on display. And between four different mudlarks, we kind of laid it out to see what letters we had. And we had the entire lowercase Alphabet.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:36:52] Speaker C: Which is brilliant. Only the Q was missing because it was in a house that we didn't have access to. But it does exist, and it wasn't on display, but we know we have that. So we have the complete lowercase. And now we're starting trying to put together the uppercase letters.
So every year more and more comes to the surface. So we hope that eventually the Emory Walker foundation, their trust, will have the entire Alphabet back in their possession and maybe even print with the original letters instead of the digital facsimile. Use the original letters again in gone paper. So now when you go to the historic house, you can see mine on permanent display in the museum.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: And why are there so many of each letter made? Is it because each page would need to be laid out, so you would need several, I don't know, hundred Fs or whatever, NAs and things like that. Okay, okay, okay.
[00:37:52] Speaker C: So vowels were. Obviously a lot more were produced because they're used so often.
But yeah, you can just imagine how many hundred pieces of type are required. And not only the type, but we find the spacers as well. So when you have a space between each word, you've got the spacers that are blanks. Yeah, but we found those as well.
So slowly we're putting them back together and we can make words out of the letters that we've actually made or found.
[00:38:19] Speaker B: That is fascinating. Yeah, really, really interesting. Do you know of any other stuff, similar stories of kind of letters or typefaces or things that have been lost or discovered by mudlarking?
[00:38:32] Speaker C: So another story about letterpress.
Fleet street, as you know, is parallel to the Thames in central London. And Fleet street is where all of the newspapers and publicists and publishers used to be located.
And typesetters were very lazy.
And so instead of putting every single letter back into the case, they would put them in their pockets. At least this is our theory. And on the way home, as they cross the river, they would just dump them into the river. And we find loads of type in that one stretch of the river. And we think it's all coming from Fleet Street. Typesetters that were just too lazy to put them back into the uppercase and the lowercases within the factory.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: Now, I've heard about this uppercase, lowercase thing. So is it the idea that there's these long drawers of letters and so they're almost like cases, and you pull the top case out or the uppercase and it's got all the capital letters and then you go, okay, yeah, wow. Yeah, that is lazy. Given that they're like little this. I mean, they're lazy in our Eyes, because they're sort of absolute treasures now when we find them all these years later. But I guess to them, it's a bit like the clay pipes that are just discarded. They're no use to them anymore. Or, you know, they've got however many hundred more that they can use.
[00:39:56] Speaker C: Yeah. So another really good one. And just to come on to the major exhibition which starts next week at the London Museum, Docklands. So over in Canary Wharf.
So different mudlarks search different areas, and over a series of years, Montreks have found that they found the same thing that connect back together.
So one of the most interesting ones is a portable pocket watch and it's a sundial. So a portable sundial so that you can figure out what time of day it is. And it's carved of bone and the top and the bottom were missing.
Sorry, Were lost together, but then found separately by two different mudlarks. And then in this exhibition, which starts next week, you can see them put back together after, what, 400 years in the river. So I think they date back to around the 16th century.
So it's quite magical when things do come together.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: That's fascinating. And I love that sort of full circle and the sense of community that you were talking about at the beginning, where you've got this, you know, everybody's out there searching for things, but also there's a sense of respect, of not only reporting it to the right people, having the right permits and all of that, but also being able to share with each other. Guess what I found. Look what I found. And being able to have that ability to reconnect these items.
[00:41:20] Speaker C: Yeah. So just to explain the setup, a lot of times we're out early in the morning, and as the name says, we're mud larks. So we're up with the larks in the morning in the mud, and we also go night, Ling.
So at night we strap on our head torches and go out, because in the summer, the. The lowest tides. We're always searching for the lowest tides of the year. And my whole life revolves around the tide tables. So if my wife. Yeah, my wife is a bit mad about that, because I plan out my whole year based on the tides. So we can't go on holiday this week because the tide's out and we've got to go next week. So. Or I get back from holiday and then I rush to the foreshore, I strap on my head torch and go searching, because this is super low, low tide at night. So typically what we do is, if it's an early morning tide, we kind of arrive knowing that there's going to be other mudlarks in the area. And since we're all friends, then we go out for breakfast or for coffee afterwards. We kind of lay out our finds on the table and just kind of show. Show each other what we found and ooh and ah and share the knowledge with each other. If it's an evening tide and if it's a late one, then we go for a pint beforehand. So a bit of drunk mudlarking.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: Brilliant.
[00:42:33] Speaker C: Or if it's an earlier evening tide, then we end up at the pub afterwards and again, kind of lay everything out and have a couple of pints just to kind of finish off the evening. But it's quite magical at night because my eyes tend to wander a lot and it's nice to kind of be focused on one specific area. So if you have a pool of light.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: Yeah, you're limited.
[00:42:53] Speaker C: You're kind of limited to that area. And also the party boats are going up and down the river. So you can hear the Bee Gees and Beyonce singing in the distance.
[00:43:02] Speaker B: You've got music to come to the party. Yeah.
[00:43:04] Speaker C: And recently they installed this beautiful light insulation on all of the bridges.
And so they're magically glowing and all these. These different colors and they're oscillating between the. The different rainbow and cacophony of colors.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:43:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: Oh, my God. There's so much.
So much more to it. It's a sort of whole day thing, isn't it? It's not just.
[00:43:26] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a hobby. It's a way of life. Yeah.
[00:43:29] Speaker B: And are you called mud owls at night? Is it. Do you have to change the term for. If you're doing it?
[00:43:35] Speaker C: We're called night larks.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: Night larks. Oh, there's. Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:40] Speaker C: Not to be cute, confused with not night hawks. So night hawks are bad.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:43:44] Speaker C: They're the ones that go digging up fields at night trying to dig up treasures that they shouldn't be digging up. We're night larks.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:43:52] Speaker C: Respectable mud larks. Just out at night.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: So if we see people, you know, with head torches on, digging around. Yeah. We'll shout to check your.
[00:44:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: Night.
[00:44:03] Speaker C: So we look like idiots down there because these things are so small and everything is camouflage. So the river tones, it's kind of like black, brown and gray.
[00:44:13] Speaker B: Right.
[00:44:14] Speaker C: So to find anything in that terrain, you have to get down on your hands and knees. So I wear knee pads, I wear gloves, I wear wellies. And then with my Head towards and middle of the night, we're crawling around on our hands and knees looking for these long lost artifacts. So there's always a couple of drunk people passing by.
What are you guys doing down there? And we're like, we're searching for Roman coins.
What?
Nobody can believe that you're actually finding these like 2000 year old artifacts just laying on the foreshore at low tide.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: So, oh my goodness, it's so fascinating and I could talk to you for hours about it, but I'd love you to tell us a little bit about one the book.
Books.
[00:45:00] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:45:01] Speaker B: That you've written and also the exhibition a little bit more. So where can people find all these things?
[00:45:08] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. So I've written two books. The first book was written chronologically with my friend Nick Stevens. And it kind of takes you through London's history, through the artifacts we find pretty much from prehistoric times, starting with the fossils that we discussed, flint tools, early man made objects, all the way to modern finds like messages and bottles or seahorses. Who knew that seahorses live in the Thames? But they do. We find them washed up, surprised.
[00:45:35] Speaker B: Anything can live in the tents.
[00:45:36] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but, yeah, strangely you say that, but there's so many seals that live in the towns. We see whales sail or cruising up, swimming upstream. So it's quite a unusual mix of wildlife along the river.
The second book focuses not only on the finds, but also the finders. So just going back to this whole sense of community.
So I interviewed 33 different mudlarks, including my son, who was nine years old at the time. But I've kind of ranged it from like an 86 year old man and 82 year old woman down to teenagers and few adolescents that are also mudlark. But just show the wide range and tell you their personal stories, why they keep coming back, the thrill of the hunt and their best finds. So I showcase their best finds as well as the people themselves because there's a bit of social history as well. And these mudlarks, I mean we've been doing it officially for about maybe 40 years, but back in the 1950s there were famous mudlarks and the original mudlarks, which we haven't touched on, date back to late Georgian, early and Victorian times. And they were the poorest members of society that were mudlarking to survive.
So they had nothing, they had tattered clothes. They were going down to find anything that was of any value that they could immediately resell to a dock worker for a few quid or a few Pence and go buy breakfast or buy a loaf of bread or something to survive. I think there were kind of ups and downs and I think people always discover it during times of turmoil. Most recently during the COVID pandemic, we all were kind of stuck at home. You just walked to the river and you felt like you were on holiday because if you remember, the weather was beautiful during COVID and people just discovered the river again because we weren't allowed to travel. Yeah. And that's why mudlarking just rocketed.
So previously there were only like maybe 375 permits in existence. And then after Covid it rocketed up to 5,000 permits before they capped it and said no more permits allowed. And now they've changed the restrictions to reduce it to 4,000. And so that's a sustainable way to keep mudlarking going without too many people down on the foreshore not knowing what they're doing and health and safety and all of that. Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:02] Speaker B: So two incredible books that people can kind of find out a little bit more and dig into.
You've got the exhibition.
[00:48:10] Speaker C: Yeah. So major new exhibition, London Museum Dockland, starts on the 4th of April, 2025, depending on when you're listening to this podcast. It's an 11 month long exhibition. It's been curated by an archaeological curator there at the London Museum that's worked very closely with us over the past 20 years, recording our finds. And the most fascinating aspect for me personally was they recreated the foreshore. So even though they've capped the number of licenses, they've created a virtual foreshore within the museum and hidden a lot of nice artifacts within this kind of gravelly surface. And I had a sneak peek last week at the exhibition and that's what caught my eye. And I just was fixated on finding all these hidden gems within the virtual foreshore within the museum.
[00:49:00] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:49:00] Speaker C: Yeah. But we also do a series of external exhibitions as well. So we have kind of a traveling group and we go from historic venue to historic venue and that's when you can meet the mudlarks, see their collections or personal collections, which most people have tucked underway under their beds or on top of cupboards at home. We dust them off a few times a year and show them to the public. But if you want to go mudlarking, I'd highly recommend booking a tour with the Thames Explorer Trust. They're based in Chiswick by the rnli, but they do tours throughout London. You go experience mudlarking for yourself, find some amazing artifacts, see what it's like being a mudlark and also just learning about London's history.
[00:49:47] Speaker B: Incredible. I mean, I literally want to go right now. It's fascinating to talk to you and realize that you have an insane amount of knowledge just from finding all these things as well.
[00:49:58] Speaker C: Well, we say that the River Thames is a liquid history book and as an American coming here, I very, I knew very little about British history, but I've learned everything just by finding things. And they say it's not what you you find, it's what you find out.
[00:50:14] Speaker B: Oh, you've just added a little bow at the end of the of the episode. Oh, gosh. Thank you so much and inviting us to come and have a look at all these incredible treasures.
[00:50:24] Speaker A: To find out more about Jason, find him on Instagram asunmudlar, check out his books and look out for the latest exhibitions. All the links and details will be in today's episode.
[00:50:34] Speaker B: Show Notes.
[00:50:36] Speaker A: Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe, leave a review or share it with a fellow lettering enthusiast. And for all the details to connect with us, check out the Show Notes. A huge thank you to my producer Heidi Cullop for ensuring this podcast reached your ears. And finally, to all the guests featured in this series. Go check them out.
