FINDING SOLACE IN THE SILT

When Sean Clark lost his beloved wife of 31 years to a brain aneurysm, the widower found sanctuary in scouring the banks of the Thames for treasure. As a major new exhibition about mudlarking opens, he tells JANE WARREN why unearthing the past can be the key to moving forward

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AS THE tide retreats, a figure crawls slowly across the mud and shingle of the glistening foreshore of the River Thames in Central London. Sean Clark, 60, is scrutinising the silt for fragments of forgotten lives — the detritus of an ancient city constantly being raked over by the tide.

“I never use a metal detector, I never dig. I just crawl on my knees looking,” he explains. “The Thames foreshore is one of the world’s largest archaeological sites and everything I have found just emerges from the silt in front of me.”

For determined “mudlarks” licensed history hunters such as Sean, who scour the riverbanks of our capital with a permit to keep most of what they find relics lost to time are waiting to be discovered with every falling tide. On mornings where thick mist hangs low over the river, the sound of traffic in the very heart of the city is silenced and Sean is transported back in time.

“In fog, the skyscrapers disappear and none of the boats run,” he says. “Then on the hours, the quarters and the halves, all you can hear are the medieval church bells ringing and I could be right back in the 1500s.”

A major new exhibition at London Museum Docklands is focusing on the fascinating finds of a river that holds thousands of years of the city's history. But for Sean, whose story features in the exhibition, searching for evidence of the past has become his sanctuary, a place of unexpected connection, following a life-altering loss when his childhood sweetheart Trudy, to whom he was married for 31 years, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 2017.