Talking Rubbish: Refuse, Reuse and Scavenging on t

Southwark Cathedral are delighted to host this online event with London mudlark Lara Maiklem and historian Dr Emily Cockayne

Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames and A Field Guide to Larking , and Emily Cockayne, author of Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go, take an online wander through their collections to explore refuse, reuse and scavenging on the Thames foreshore for this event via Zoom.

Lara Maiklem

Lara Maiklem is a mudlark. She searches for lost and forgotten objects on the foreshore of the Tidal Thames, through central London and beyond. Among the thousands of things she has rescued from the mud are Tudor shoes, medieval pins, Roman pots, Georgian wig curlers and modern wedding rings.Her first book, 'Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames' (Bloomsbury, 2019), is the story of the river told through the objects she has found and is a tale of obsession, tide-watching, mud-walking and endless hours of searching in all weathers. Mudlarking was a Sunday Times Bestseller, an Observer Book of the Year, Radio 4 Book of the Week and Winner of the 2020 Indie Book Award for Non Fiction.

Her second book, A Field Guide to Larking: Beachcombing, Mudlarking, Fieldwalking and More, is an illustrated practical guide for those who want to search for themselves, whether on beaches (beachlarking), in fields (fieldlarking), houses (houselarking), gardens (gardenlarking) and of course mudlarking in rivers.Lara grew up in the countryside, moved to London in the early 1990s and now lives a ten-minute walk from the beach on the east Kent coast. She has been mudlarking for almost 20 years and has spent a lifetime looking down for lost objects and interesting things. Lara has appeared on numerous radio and television programmes and has written about mudlarking for the Guardian, the Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Spectator and BBC Radio.

Dr Emily Cockayne

Emily Cockayne is a senior lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused (Profile, 2020), Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours (Random House, 2012) and Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England (2007), cited by Toni Morrison as an important source for her novel from 2008 entitled, A Mercy.

She tweets as @Rummage_work, and has a website: https://www.rummage.work/about