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摘要

When I'm tired of London, but not quite tired of life, I head down to the Thames and, if the tide is out, walk along the beaches there. It's an unsettling landscape: an empty strip in the centre of Europe's largest city. The foreshore is gravelly, sometimes muddy and layered with the relics of London's past: industrial, social, archaeological. It spends half of every day under metres of water. The river is the centre of London - the reason the Romans founded the city - and it has always dominated life here. Every generation has used it; each leaving behind artefacts that can be found today. Those that last best are ceramic and it's possible to find fragments of pottery spanning 2,000 years in the space of 100 metres. Searching for London's history by the Thames is called mudlarking. It's an old name, once used of the most deprived of society, who spent the hours of low tide hunting for scraps, which they'd sell.