Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past. What would they find? A rusted Lime bike, a message in a takeaway soy sauce bottle? ‘Vapes,’ says Kate Sumnall, curator of the Secrets of the Thames exhibition at the London Museum Docklands. ‘Lots of vapes.’

Mudlarking – the practice of scavenging at low tide for washed-up historical treasures, oddities or mundane objects – has become a well-gatekept hobby over the past five years. More than 10,000 people are now on the waiting list for mudlarking permits. Of course, anyone can go down to the foreshore to look around and turn pebbles over with their shoe, but even if you flout the rules, mudlarking is no longer the grubby, lawless enterprise it used to be.

The first mudlarks were criminals, but quite pathetic ones. Writing in 1796, the founder of the Thames River Police called them ‘the lowest cast of thieves’. They rode the coat-tails of more daring plunderers who looted the coal-barges and ships carrying sugar, rum and spices from the West Indies. Mudlarks would wade in the shallows and pick up bags of stolen goods tossed overboard, which they transported to land. Some poked around with sticks looking for bits of coal, but mostly they found scraps of rope, bones, rags and broken glass which sold for next to nothing.

The Victorian anthropologist James Greenwood classed the mudlarks he saw as ‘gaunt, old-fashioned children’, ‘stalwart, brawny men’ and ‘tottering old women’: ‘each may be seen daily battling with the rising river for a crust’. The women were often eccentrics or drunks, dressed in rags and disappearing without a trace. A police report in 1841 describes the arrest of Katharine Macarthy, ‘the dread of the Thames-police’, who, on multiple occasions, ‘embraced the officers like a bear, and, after half smothering them, has left them as muddy as herself’. These descriptions form a sharp contrast with the Rab jackets and Toast jumpers down on the foreshore today.

In the mid-19th century, a pair of mudlarks........

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