You're hearing Joe Ellison, editor of the FT's luxury magazine How to Spend It, standing

on the banks of the river Thames in London, with her fingers in a mushy block of wood.

He's with a guide named Lara Maklin, an urban explorer, who's showing her how to scavenge

for treasures.

So that's a whale's, I don't know if it's a whale, it looks like a whale, isn't it?

Wow, it does anything here, why does it have to be a whale's, looking out of the ground?

Joe and Lara are mud-larking, Lara's written two books about it.

It's an increasingly popular hobby in London and it involves looking for fragments of history

in the mud.

That's Lara Maklin, Lara and the peninsula is the Greenland Dock and that was home to

the Greenland, London's whaling fleet and they go off to Greenland to hunt whales and

bring them back to Greenland Dock to be rendered down into fat.

And so I've found other whale burns out on the peninsula.

This one here could have come from Greenland Dock, it's better than wood, it's lasted much

longer.

They're in an area known as the Docklands, on the banks of the river in Far East London.

The Greenland Dock was docking whaling ships throughout the 1700s.

And that's just one bit of history that's still floating through the Thames.

There are vestiges from London's role as a global port, like those whale bones and Hindu

carvings, but also there are really old bits of everyday life, like ceramic tobacco pipes

that Victorians would smoke through and then drop into the river, or medieval roofing

tiles, or very old baby shoes.

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