Ever since man first quenched his thirst in its waters, he has left his mark on the riverbed.
Ivor Noël Hume, Treasure in the Thames (1956)
London would not exist without the River Thames. It is a source of fresh water and food, a path of communication and transportation, and acts as a real and imaginary boundary. More importantly, it facilitates trade using the incoming and outgoing tides that has made London such a functional and successful port.
Since the beginning of time, the River Thames in London has been a great repository, collecting everything that has been deposited into its waters. Once discovered, these objects reveal stories of the capital’s fascinating history and its inhabitants.
A collection of battered 17th century trading tokens, including ones minted in the year of the Great Fire of London in 1666, could fetch £20,000 at auction.
Roger Green, who is from Kent, spent 35 years collecting the tokens on the muddy banks of the River Thames.
They were issued by traders instead of money due to a lack of available small change at the time.
Many of the money tokens bear the names of the traders who once issued them, including Walter and William .
The entire collection is expected to fetch between £15,000 and £20,000 when it is sold at Hansons Auctioneers, in Derbyshire, later this month.
For decades now, the diminutive but delightful Shire classics have been the niche collector’s best friend. These little books, whose subjects have included clay pipes, pewter, samplers, historic ships, ceramics and even the Victorian domestic servant, for me evoke pleasurable hours browsing in village bookshops. So it is with great affection that I picked up their latest publication, Jason Sandy and Nick Stevens’s
Thames Mudlarking: Searching for London’s Lost Treasures – which was even more appealing because I myself am a keen Thames mudlarker (some of the beads I have found are illustrated in the book). The book conveys its potted history of London via a range of artefacts recovered in the river by mudlarks – amateur archaeologists intent on locating fragments of the past. The variety of these artefacts is such that this is the first Shire book to bring together so many different areas of collectable interest in one place. It romps through the centuries with gusto, and