Welcome to the Fern podcast as the season turns. I'm Leah Lane Dirts and I'm delighted to introduce this found sound for July, created by musician and sound artist Alice Boyd.

For this year's Found Sounds, Alice travels across the UK to meet people inspired by heritage crafts,

folklore and the landscape, creating a sonic scrapbook of their practice.

This month, Alice visits author and mudlark Lara

Maclam on the Thames foreshore in Wapping London. Lara takes us on a mudlarking walk to search

for London's forgotten objects. Lara Maclem is a leading voice in uncovering the hidden histories buried along the Thames.

Her four books on mudlarking include the Sunday Times bestseller, mudlarking, lost and found on the River Thames.

From prehistoric flints to medieval pilgrim badges and Tudor shoes, her work brings to light the lives of ordinary

people who shaped London's past. You may wish to pause the podcast here for a moment, while you

find somewhere warm and quiet to close your eyes, sit back and settle down into this month's found sound.

So, Lara, can you introduce yourself and describe your work?

Yes, my name's Lara Maclam. I'm a mudlark and I'm an author.

Can you tell me a bit about what mudlarking is because I don't think everyone will know at home and just how mudlarking has evolved over the centuries.

Mudlarking is basically searching the bed of a river for lost and forgotten objects.

I think there's probably been river scavengers for as long as there have been people who

are poor enough to search for objects and people throwing things into rivers.

But they really came to prominence

in the 1900s when there were a lot of social historians writing about poverty and they saw these

people, groups of very, very poor people, mostly women, old people and children, people on

the very fringes of society who would descend onto the bed of the River Thames looking for anything that they could use or sell. So they were looking for rope or rags or a copper nail if they were lucky and bottles that they could sell to people for recycling. That's all they could do really. I mean, they wade around in money. I mean, you can imagine what the river was like at the time. It was just a moving cesspit. Wading around in that, all weather, just to keep themselves out of the workhouse. Fast forward into the 20th century, and mudlocking started to become a hobby around the time of the Second World War, actually. At the beginning of the 1970s, metal detectors became more more affordable and people descended so on to the

foreshore with metal detectors and started to dig it over really quite aggressively looking for

anything they could often sell and mudlarking from then has evolved into a hobby for people

...