Mudlarking and making – artist Madeleine Marsh talks about her work

Image: Artist Madeleine Marsh with her ‘Madlarked mirror’ showing the history of London in bits and pieces picked up from the foreshore of the River Thames

The whole history of London laid out in one glorious muddle on the foreshore

The artist Madeleine Marsh gave a talk about mudlarking and making – how she finds bits and pieces on the Thames foreshore and makes them into pieces of jewellery and sculpture – at the Fuller’s Griffin Brewery on Sunday (25 May).

She is one of the four artists whose work is on show there until Sunday 4 June as part of the ‘Sculpture at the Brewery’ exhibition organised  by The Chiswick Calendar.

READ ALSO: Sculpture at the Griffin Brewery – 3 May – 2 June 2025

Madeleine has been mudlarking for 30 years – “long before it was popular” and is one of only a few artists who are licenced to mudlark to use the things they find in their work.

“I have spent my whole life within walking distance of the river,” she told the audience on Sunday.

“For all of us lucky enough to live near the river, this is London, the centre of London. For others who live in north London their centre of London will be different, it might be Hampstead Heath, but for us it’s the river.”

Madeleine grew up in Barnes and moved to Hammersmith in the late 1980s, never far from Hammersmith Bridge, Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s magnificent wrought iron suspension bridge.

“I am fascinated by the river, but also by the history of packaging,” she said.

Image: Part of the mirror frame showing an HP Sauce bottle, Bovril and Matinee Turkish cigarette packaging and a Clipper lighter with Trans Power slogan

From a prehistoric shark’s tooth to a lighter with a Trans Power slogan – all history is here

Her work reflects the history of London through what she finds. In the Sculpture at the Brewery exhibition she has a mirror, the frame of which is made from more than a hundred bits and pieces, from a fossilised shark’s tooth 50 million years old to a Clipper lighter with the exhortation ‘Fight for your rights’.

“It’s a Trans power slogan. What could be more 21st century?”

Unlike most mud larkers, who are looking to see if they can find anything of value, Madeleine is looking for things that tell the story of London, so the lighter is as valuable a find as a bit of a plate from Quaglino’s, which she had also picked up.

The famous restaurant was founded at the height of the Roaring 1920s and quickly became known for its glamorous atmosphere, excellent food and entertainment, and for attracting royalty.

“That’s where you went if you wanted to catch a glimpse of Edward VIII snogging Wallis Simpson.”

Images: (L) A bit of a plate from Chez Quaglino; (R) A bit of an Oxo jar and a Virol pot – ‘A preparation of bone marrow, an ideal fat food for children & invalids’

The original mud larkers

The original mud larkers were the poorest of the poor in Victorian London, who scraped a desperate living by waiting for the tide to recede and picking over the foreshore for anything of value.

The campaigning Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew, founder of Punch magazine, made a study of the poor, titled ‘London Labour and the London Poor‘, for which he interviewed a group of mud larkers.

They fell into two groups, said Madeleine: children who were orphans, or whose parents were ill or in prison, and old women who were not able to make money any other way.

They could earn threepence on a good day, if they found a copper nail dropped by a shipwright.

Mayhew observed that if he had put all the material from their ragged clothes together, he would not have had enough material to make a gentleman’s shirt.

Image: (L) A bit of Willow Pattern plate; (R) A Fortnum & Mason’s lid, an arm from a statuette of Ganesha and china from the London Orphans Asylum

History as told by the ships which docked at the Port of London

Now as then, the fruits of London’s waste are presented in a glorious muddle, churned over by the tide.

“It’s like being an archaeologist, only you don’t have to dig,” Madeleine told her audience.

She finds a lot of clay pipes, both with small bowls from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and with larger bowls from later on, when tobacco was more plentiful and addicted smokers wanted more of it for a satisfying smoke.

She also finds a great deal of porcelain. Chinese porcelain, brought into the Port of London as ballast, was popular in Britain before we had the know-how to make it ourselves, and was the preserve of the rich.

Ordinary people ate off Staffordshire slipware, thick pottery in earthy browns and greys.

Bits of Willow Pattern plates are also a common find – the first decorated pottery made on an industrial scale and available cheaply enough for the masses.

Image: (L) A Sainsburys potted meat jar; (R) Victorian poison bottle and a Keiller’s marmalade jar

“Nobody did packaging like the Victorians”

Warming to her theme of the history of packaging, she showed us a piece of a Keiller’s marmalade jar – the first commercial brand made in Great Britain, manufactured in Dundee – and a bit of a pot for Burgess’s anchovy paste, popular in Victorian times.

“Lord Nelson had some on the Victory. This was the rival brand, Gentlemen’s Relish, made by Fortnum and Mason,” [brandishing a jar].

Sainsburys potted meat and bloater paste was also popular, and hence well represented in her shoreline trawls.

Bloater paste was a herring paste made from a closely guarded recipe by Sainsburys from 1890 until after the Second World War, sold in an attractive little ceramic pot, sealed with a wax disc and covered with a heavy tin foil.

Images: (L) Burgess’s Genuine anchovy paste and a clay pipe; (R)  Confection of Senna ‘Dose – One teaspoonful or more as occasion may require’

“Nobody did packaging like the Victorians,” said Madeleine. “Poison bottles had ‘poison’ written on them and were made from blue glass, so if you were an illiterate mud larker you would know straight away what it was from the colour.”

Bottles were also made in distinctive shapes, so if you were fumbling around in the dark for your medicine bottle at night, you could find it.

Images: (L) China from White’s gentleman’s club and (R) from the London Orphans Asylum and Rowton’s workhouse in Hammersmith

“The joy of mudlarking is that there is no class consciousness,” she said, showing us a bit of a plate from White’s, the oldest private members’ club in the world, and a notorious gambling den in its heyday.

There was china from the Carlton hotel, but also from Rowton House, the working men’s hostel in Hammersmith built by the Victorian philanthropist Lord Rowton to accommodate 800 people.

“Every man had his own cubicle. There was a library of books and shoe mender, so if you went out looking for work you could look respectable.”

Vice was a common theme amongst Madeleine’s mud larked treasures. She has found a bullet and a musket ball, knives, and on one occasion a gun, which she handed in to the police.

“Criminals have always used the river to get rid of the evidence of their crimes.”

During lockdown, when everyone was out walking, the riverbank was littered with nitrous oxide canisters, she said.

Royalty was another strong theme. She has found plenty of coins and Coronation mugs.

Bits of golden arms had her puzzled for a while, until she realised the Thames was declared a sacred river in the 1970s for Hindus who were not able to make the journey to the Ganges. The figure of Ganesha, used in many Hindu religious rituals, may have up to 16 arms (usually four).

You can see Madeleine’s ‘mad larked’ mirror along with her other work and that of Roz Wallis, Gillian Brett and Caroline Winn, at Sculpture at the Brewery in the Tun room inside the shop at the Griffin Brewery until Sunday 1 June, open Tuesday – Saturday from 10.00am – 6.00pm and on Sunday from 12.30 – 5.00pm

Image: Visitors to the Fuller’s Griffin Brewery on Sunday for Madeleine’s talk

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