Anderson said that the strictures of the new permit regime were weighing on her. “I can’t just potter around kicking stones, you know,” she said. She had to come up with the goods. “There definitely is more of a pressure, which doesn’t help.” Anderson talked about the importance of fostering a good relationship with your FLO, or finds liaison officer, who decides whether or not something is recordable. Once or twice, I noticed that Anderson used the word “recordable” to describe herself rather than what she found, as if it were her own authenticity and distinctiveness that was being adjudicated.
The man who manages the mudlarks is James Trimmer, the director of planning and development at the P.L.A. Trimmer is a surveyor by training. For most of his twenty-seven years at the Port, he has been concerned with things like dredging operations, sewage infrastructure, and the movement of freight along the Thames. (The Port of London is the U.K.’s busiest port, by tonnage.) When talking about mudlarks, Trimmer seems like a seasoned provincial governor who has been dispatched to a small but restive outpost, one full of deeply held beliefs that he does not entirely understand but which nonetheless requires a measure of firm control. “Hobbies ended up being codified, because more people started doing it,” Trimmer said. “And without wishing to portray myself as some sort of Victorian gentleman this couldn’t keep carrying on as it was.”
For years, Trimmer explained, mudlarking was a closed world. There were about a hundred hobbyists, whom he and his colleagues knew by name, or by sight—shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the detritus of the shore. The groundswell, as Trimmer called it, began with the success of books like Sandling’s and, especially, with the rise of mudlarking social-media accounts in the twenty-tens. In 2019, Lara Maiklem, a mudlark with nearly a hundred and fifty thousand Facebook followers, published “Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames,” a lyrical account of her life on the foreshore, which became a best-seller. During the pandemic, Trimmer and his colleagues watched the numbers continue to increase, and in 2022 he began hearing reports of arguments on the riverbank. “There were these people who were saying, ‘This is our area, you don’t belong here,’ and even reports of altercations,” he said. “It was then, you know, how many is too many?”
The maximum number of mudlarks, which Trimmer reached after discussions with Historic England, a government-run heritage organization, and the Museum of London Docklands, was four thousand. “It seemed reasonable,” he said, “in the great British idea of reasonable.” Most mudlarks appreciate Trimmer, even if they kvetch about the permit system. At the exhibition at St. Martin, they referred to him as Trim and gossiped about where he likes to check people’s permits. (At Queenhithe, near St. Paul’s, where archeologists have found the remains of a Roman quay.) Trimmer said that, compared to dealing with government agencies, he has more freedom when supervising the mudlarks, but at the same time more responsibility. “You are intruding on how people see themselves,” he said. The waiting list, which is still closed, stands at around seven thousand.
Last June, “London Centric”—an investigative newsletter—reported on rising tensions among mudlarks, including a police investigation into graffiti insulting Maiklem, which was daubed in two places along the riverbank. The graffiti read, in large pink letters: “LARA = FAKER LIES” and “LARA = SELFISH FRAUD.” Maiklem has done more than anyone to give voice to the soulful aspect of mudlarking—its possibilities for escape and discovery at the same time. (In May, on Instagram, she reposted an interview with Tucci, in which he called her the “queen of the mudlarks.”) But she has her detractors, too. For years, Maiklem has been an advocate of “eyes only” mudlarking—finding objects already exposed, as opposed to digging and scraping for them. “I have always had this very, very strong conviction that people shouldn’t be digging up the foreshore,” she told me recently. “Forcing it to give up what it’s not ready to give up.”
