Found at the Water’s Edge

Malcolm Russell is a history writer and mudlark who searches the River Thames at low tide for scraps of London’s past. The thousands of objects he has recovered include Roman gaming counters, Tudor rings, eighteenth-century wig curlers, Victorian ammunition, and contemporary spells. In his first book, Mudlark’d: Hidden Histories from the River Thames (Thames & Hudson/Princeton University Press), he uses these artefacts to reveal the stories of a diverse array of London’s unremembered people. Mudlark'd received praise from The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Current Archaeology.

Remiiya Badru is an Artist, Walker, Creative Learning Practitioner, Researcher and Consultant.

Throughout her lived experiences, Remiiya has held a long deep fascination with the spiritual essence of the river, in all of its forms, processes and tributaries. She is hugely passionate and inspired by walking the River Thames, particularly in and around the ‘U-bend’ between London Docklands, Greenwich and beyond.

She communes with and responds to this timeless resource from a multi-sensory perspective and witness to infrastructural change. This holistic embodiment includes the river’s forever changing palette of scent, sound, colour and surface to colonial and post-colonial human narrative themes, industrial change, heritage and development. Through the art of walking, she channels, explores and creates her responses to these multi-faceted inter relationships and juxtapositions within her practice, through her creative tributaries of drawing, photography, writing, design and making. Timehri, Remiiya's model ship, is currently guiding her navigation and shaping her current work. Their journey led them to being contributors in Paul Wyatt‘s documentary film Time and Tide: The Thames, Greenwich and its forgotten past, about people’s engagement with and connection to the River Thames from a diverse range of perspectives and experiences.

Photo © Paul Wyatt

Tom Chivers is a writer, researcher, publisher, arts producer and licensed Thames mudlark. His non-fiction debut London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City (Penguin, 2021) was Audiobook of the Week in The Times. He is currently completing a postgraduate research project entitled In the Flow of Things: Encounters with the Mudlarks of the Thames Foreshore with Queen Mary, University of London and Museum of London Archaeology/Thames Discovery Programme. He lives in Rotherhithe with his two daughters.

Photo © Akiko DuPont

Dr Aleema Gray is a Jamaican-born curator, researcher and public historian based in London. She was awarded the Yesu Persaud Scholarship for her PhD entitled Bun Babylon; A Community-engaged History of Rastafari in Britain. Aleema’s work focuses on documenting Black history in Britain through the perspective of lived experiences. Her practice is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to notions of belonging, memory, and contested heritage. 

She is the Lead Curator for Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music at the British Library and the founder of House of Dread, an anti-disciplinary heritage studio.

Marie-Louise Plum is a multidisciplinary artist and mudlark. She has written about art and mudlarking for several print and digital publications, and you may have seen her talking about mudlarking on BBC Radio 4, NBC, London Live, or at events in historic venues such as St. Paul's Cathedral, London's Roman Amphitheatre and London Museum. Marie's popular videos and writing on the subject of river-found artefacts have reached an audience of over two million people. Marie is a co-curator of Hands on History, the largest mudlarking event in the world, which takes place annually during the Totally Thames Festival. 

Image © Marie-Louise Plum/@oldfatherthames