Meet the 14-Year-Old Mudlark Finding London's Lost History in the Thames

Most 14-year-olds spend their summer holidays sleeping in and scrolling. Emmylou Vaxby spent hers writing up to 2,800 words a day and pulling pieces of London’s past out of the River Thames. She’s a mudlark, someone who searches the river’s foreshore at low tide, and she’s been doing it since she was five or six years old. This past summer, she turned that decade of knowledge into a book:A Guide to Mudlarking on the River Thames.

Her finds aren’t crown jewels, and that’s the point. She digs up Georgian and Victorian pottery, clay tobacco pipes, shells, and even a pipe bowl crafted by an 18th-century maker named William Manby. She told journalist Fleur Britten that she gets to do this for fun, while Victorian children had to do it to make a living. For her, it’s also an escape: an hour on the riverbank where schoolwork stress simply doesn’t exist.

Emmylou isn’t just taking from the river. She founded the Wapping Plastic-Free Community in 2021 and organizes riverbank clean-ups twice a year, and she does it all properly, with a Port of London Authority permit and finds reported through the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Her parents, both musicians, and her 10-year-old brother often join the hunt. So here’s our question: what’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever found in an unexpected place?