BEACHCOMBING
ON THE
By B.J. Roche
It
all began one Sunday morning, when we were drinking coffee and watching a Rick
Steves marathon on public television: There was Rick, signing off from
As
he walked along, he reached down and casually picked up the bowl of a small
clay smoking pipe--the kind you see in 19th century paintings being smoked by
fat little men in waistcoats. Cute, but, we figured,
Rick’s producer had probably planted that pipe. What were the chances that, in
one of the world’s most expensive cities, you could stumble onto a 300-year-old
artifact for the price of drycleaning your muddy pants?
Quite
good, it turns out.
A
few months later, as we were walking along the Thames Path that leads from the
The
tide was out, so we wandered down to where the water lapped the muck.
Once
on the shore of "Old Father Thames," we were in a different world.
Within a shout of the sterile, ultra-modern skyscrapers where Europe’s
financial affairs are managed, we found the detritus of a thousand years: a
beach comprised, not of shells or stones, but of waves and waves of broken down
bits of debris: roof tiles, confetti-like shards of china, each with a piece of
a pattern; frosty, pale-green chunks of bottles of varying shapes and ages.
Teapot
handles. The footlong jawbone of an unidentified animal.
Old nails, three and four inches long. A giant wagon wheel.
Yuck! Don't
stray too far into the muck...or you could get stuck!
And
thousands of pieces of gray-colored, clay pipe stems, two, three, four inches
long.
We
were hooked, and like shellseekers on
I
was hunting for my own pipe, and before I knew it, I had found one. Its stem
was broken off-- but its bowl, about an inch and a half long and crammed with
muck, was intact.
Here's what
they looked like all cleaned up...
And here are
some more things we found...
The
Brits call it "mudlarking," and it’s a tradition that goes back
hundreds of years, in part because of the central role the river played in the
life of the city. In prehistoric times, worshippers tossed their spiritual
offerings into the river; at one point they even tossed bodies into the river.
Later, its banks became the site of many a church, and in some areas, wharves,
warehouses and mills. Throughout the city's history, through floods, fires and
wars, a lot of stuff has ended up in the
All
that makes beach, or "foreshore,"
In
fact, the bulk of the artifacts in the prehistoric displays in London’s
museums, including prehistoric treasures like the "Battersea Shield"
and the "Westminster Helmet," were dredged from the Thames in the
1800’s, Webber notes.
In
those days, mudlarks, generally adolescent boys and girls, trawled the
shoreline, hunting for pieces of coal to sell: this, from a newspaper account
by Henry Mayhew: "the parents of many of them are coalwhippers-Irish
cockneys...Their practice is to get between the barges, and one of them lifting
the other up, will knock lumps of coal into the mud, which they pick up
afterwards... Their fathers are robust men. By going too often to the
public-house [pub] they keep their families in destitution, and the mothers of
the poor children are glad to get a few pence in whatever way they can."
Today,
mudlarking is a more upscale hobby; members of the Society of Thames Mudlarks
are granted a special license by the
See
what other mudlarkers have found.
Artists,
too, are fascinated by the river and its rubbish. Across the
Our
curiosity piqued, we crossed the
"Back
then, smoking was considered a healthy habit," he said. "It was
thought to rid the body of illness. In the old days, you would get thrown out
of school if you didn’t smoke."
Indeed,
the native American tradition of smoking tobacco
caught on quickly in the city’s clubs and taverns when it was brought back from
travelers in the late 1570’s. In his book "London: The Biography,"
Peter Ackroyd relays a diarist’s account in 1702 about an evening at a coffee
house where he was "surprised to see his sickly child of three years old
fill its pipe of tobacco, after that a second and third pipe without the least
concern."
Clay
smoking pipes are among the most ubiquitous of artifacts: "So many shops
sold pipes and tobacco that in themselves they formed ‘a large city,’"
Ackroyd writes. That was, until the invention of the cigarette in the mid 19th
century.
As
we wandered the
The
No
way could our little clay pipe compete with an emerald the size of a poker
chip. But it did provide us with a memorable travel day--and a new family
heirloom. Treasure, after all, lies in the eye of the beholder.
TRAVELERS'
TIPS:
Mike
Webber plans his mudlarking expeditions for the Original
London Walks, based on the moon, the wind, "and other such ethereal
and strange phenomenon." About a dozen London Walks offered all over the
city each day, on topics ranging from the Blitz to the Beatles. They are the
best value in
Legally,
the Queen owns the beach, but the
Still,
with the exception of the beaches in front of the Tate Modern and the OXO
Towers on the Thames’ southern shores, Webber doesn’t advise people to go down
to the beach alone. You can access the beach by walking the Thames Path between
the