Lost & Found: Book

Introduction

Deptford and Greenwich are areas rich in shipbuilding and other maritime heritage, as well as archaeology, ecology and local history. But the stories of everyday life, and particularly the experiences of those connected with maritime industries and communities, are largely submerged within written records. In Lost & Found, a diverse group of heritage trainees were tasked with revealing these untold histories using objects found on the Thames foreshore by mudlark Nicola White.

This project, produced by Thames Festival Trust and made possible by a grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, combined object research with a tailored programme of training. Paid traineeships were offered to a group of young Londoners to provide them with new skills, experiences and confidence to support them to enter the heritage sector. From over 200 applicants, ten trainees, aged between 21 and 26, were selected: Isidora Bethell, Anna Freed, Gwena Harman, Samiha Hassan, Nadia Hirsi, George Jones, Claire Lacaden, Abondance Matanda, Jude Pretoria and Ted Tinkler.

Over a seven-week period in summer 2025, the trainees and I visited heritage sites across the city including the Cutty Sark, London Museum Docklands and the London Archives, and met a range of experts and heritage professionals – from curators and archivists to archaeologists and mudlarks. We went on walking tours of Deptford and Greenwich, waded through Deptford Creek at low tide, and explored the foreshore of the River Thames. On the first day of the project, the trainees were invited to select from Nicola White’s extraordinary collection an object (or group of objects) found on the foreshore in Deptford or Greenwich. It was a bit like speed dating. Once matched, these intriguing, complex and meaningful finds provided the trainees with opportunities to research people, places and activities which are overlooked or not usually recorded in written history. This book is the result of that endeavour.

The thing about objects mudlarked from the Thames is that you can hold them in your hand. Pulled from the anaerobic mud of the riverbed at low tide, they emit a strange energy, possessing what the philosopher Jane Bennett calls vitality; objects like these, she writes, have ‘trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’.1 The essays that follow, and the beautiful photographs by Hannah Smiles that accompany them, are

attentive to the vital materiality of these things – objects made of iron, lead, pewter, wood, clay, shell and bone – as well as to the varied lives (and afterlives) that led to their discovery on the Thames foreshore.

Some of the objects – a turtle rib from the Caribbean, a power figure from the Congo River - have travelled thousands of miles before being deposited in the river at Deptford or Greenwich. Others – iron nails, a pewter medal, a sherd of Staffordshire pottery – were produced closer to home, in the workshops and factories of the Industrial Age. Others still were handcrafted by people who lived and worked in London’s maritime communities: lead gaming pieces that may have been made by convicts incarcerated on the prison hulks of Woolwich; a tiny, pipeclay figurine of a woman whose precise origin remains unknown.

Two of the objects were produced specifically for children (a demographic often overlooked by historians) and are products of the great social reform movements of the 19th century: abolitionism and temperance. Others raise ethical and political questions that are as relevant today as they were in the past. A pewter syringe designed to treat sexually transmitted infections prompts reflection on the provision of medical care for marginalised groups. Iron ships’ nails stamped with the broad arrow – to mark them out as government property – are read through the lens of working-class resistance. Barnacles and a turtle rib reveal the entanglement of the human and the other-than-human, drawing our attention to both the legacies of colonialism and ongoing environmental crises in the world.

We can be fairly certain that some of the objects – the ships’ nails, barnacles and turtle rib - were dumped or abandoned in the Thames as waste, having come to the end of their use-lives. But others may have been invested with sacred power or personal meanings about which we can only speculate. Could the pipeclay figurine represent the goddess Venus, the Virgin Mary or a sailor’s loved one? Is the Nkisi Kozo power figure a ritual offering or the survivor of colonial collecting? Was the Band of Hope medal cast into the river as a renunciation of the principles of temperance?

The essays in this book generate speculative, multiple histories, prompting new questions about the dating, provenance, manufacture and use of these beguiling finds from the foreshore. Together, they remind us that material culture is the product of dynamic exchange across space and time; it is never static. These are artefacts (and ecofacts) that ‘evade precise categorisation’, as Anna Freed writes in her examination of a mermaid deity figure. ‘Like water,’ she continues, ‘they are fluid, flowing into each other with shifting meanings.’ The trainees’ research brought these forgotten objects on new journeys too – carried across modern London to be analysed by X-ray and XRF scanner, and by the attuned eyes of experts. They have inspired visits to archives and museums, and led to unexpected conversations with archaeologists, historians, curators, spiritual practitioners and each other.

I think of mudlarking as a form of ‘unofficial’ or counter-heritage.2 Mudlarks’ finds, salvaged from the dumped detritus and casual losses of the river, reflect the everyday lives of people in the past with an immediacy often absent in conventional heritage settings. As the essays that follow demonstrate, these objects shed light on the connections between the local and the global; the hidden networks of power, meaning and movement that make the Thames foreshore such a powerful repository of alternative histories – ‘an archive like no other’ as mudlark and historian Malcolm Russell puts it.3

From sacred figures to medical waste, from barnacles to broken crockery – these are things with the power to take us on journeys into other places and cultures, journeys into the past and even into imagined futures.4 So reach out your hand and take the first step.

Tom Chivers
Heritage Project Manager, Thames Festival Trust