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A cheeky Georgian button depicting two people having sex is one of the many fascinating treasures which have emerged from the mud of the Thames.
The piece, which is believed to date back to the 18th-Century, was found by a mudlarker .
The term is given to the people who comb the 100-mile foreshore of the Thames and pick up objects and artefacts revealed in the mud by the twice daily changing tides.
Anna Borzello, 54, found the erotic miniature button, which is small enough it sits on a fingertip, earlier this year as she was walking along the river. I like the idea of someone having this really raunchy pin tucked underneath their collar that they would maybe flap up, she said.
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