Why I Spent a Year Exploring My Boring Neighborhood

One motivation for exploring a square each week, come rain or shine, was to make being out in nature part of my routine. I hoped that becoming connected with where I live, with its weather and seasons, would keep me attuned to the seedlings pushing through pavements, the migrating birds passing overhead, the provenance of the food I eat, and reveal some interesting new running routes too.

Taking just a few minutes every month to climb a tree, which I’d done for the past three years, had certainly made me happier. Each time I returned to the tree I was surprised by how much nature had changed in the past few weeks. Fun, too, had been my year of full-moon forays, getting outdoors for a run, ride, walk or swim on every full moon, and also a year of enjoying coffee outside at least monthly. If hospital gardens help people to heal, if doctors now prescribe exercise in nature, then committing to fifty-two outdoor missions sounded like a sensible undertaking. By now the habit of heading out once a week with my camera and notebook felt comfortably established.

It was a flat, grey day beneath a flat, grey December sky. The river flowing through today’s square was flat and grey, rippling as the tide nurdled ever lower. My mood, however, was neither flat nor grey. I was looking forward to this one.

A few off-limit jetties jutted out into the current, infrastructure for pipelines and industry. A conveyor belt rumbled along one, filling a barge with gravel, but all else was quiet. This was, perhaps, a grid square that only a map nerd like me could derive pleasure from. More than half of it was blue on my map, but that was an incongruous representation of the muddy, intimidating industrial estuary spreading out before me. I didn’t dare swim out to explore it.

Behind me, the rest of the square was fenced off by a shooting range, an electricity substation filled with fizzing power lines, a cement factory, a slime-covered canal (featuring a sofa tipped into the water, whose lurid colour perfectly matched the algae), and a police firearms training centre complete with replica streets and life-size sections of planes and trains. This brought back fond memories of getting a day’s pay back when I was in the Territorial Army at university to don ‘civvy’ clothes and cheerfully lob half-bricks and milk bottles at massed ranks of policemen in riot gear. It was all fun and larks until they mounted their response charge at us…

And so, in terms of my exploration, the square was effectively reduced to little more than the footpath along the embankment’s flood defences, plus whatever muddy ‘beach’ was revealed as the tide fell. That was fine by me as I’d studied the tide timetable and arrived a couple of hours before low tide, past a yard filled with ships’ anchors, ten-feet tall and tonnes galore. I was here to go mudlarking among the slimy green rocks, brown seaweed and thick grey mud of the foreshore.

A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud at low tide, looking for valuable items. It was a way of life in London during the 18th and 19th centuries, when mudlarks searched the Thames’ shore for anything of value. They earned little but enjoyed an unusual amount of independence for the period, plus they got to keep whatever they found or earned.

Lara Maiklem explores the ancient, murky, tidal foreshore of the Thames, whose ebbs and flows still churn objects to the surface that have been hidden and preserved in the mud for centuries. I had recently devoured her fabulous book Mudlarking (and enticing Instagram posts), and was fascinated by the greedy prospect of finding treasure, Roman roofing, Tudor shoes, and messages in bottles.

I donned wellies and waterproof trousers, climbed up and over the graffiti-covered embankment wall, and dropped onto the foreshore to begin my search. Its lowest reaches were a lethal gloop of deep, sloppy, stinking mud. I settled for making my way along the line where rock and mud meet, slipping over mounds of bladderwrack, a brown seaweed studded with air bladders that help it to float upright and absorb nutrients when submerged.

At low tides, the exposed seaweed forms dense beds, which theoretically should provide shelter for all sorts of creatures. But I’m afraid I saw not a single living thing among it all. A few gulls bobbed on the river, and semi-feral ponies grazed on the embankment behind me. But the water was pretty grim.

Only a few pearly-white oyster shells gave any suggestion of life in the grey mud. Over the past 200 years, habitat loss, pollution and overfishing slashed the oyster population around the UK by 95 percent, though it is now on the increase again. Across the country, things are improving from the low point of 1957, when the Thames was declared biologically dead and the river was a foul-smelling drain. It is a travesty, however, that even today, not a single river in Britain is free from pollution.

I had fully intended to find priceless loot within minutes of beginning my mudlarking. Instead, I found a rusty chair frame and heaps of plastic, including a label saying ‘BAG IT AND BIN IT, DON’T FLUSH IT’. I picked up a 1980s milk bottle with ‘PLEASE RETURN BOTTLE’ embossed on the glass. All interesting enough, but where was that jewel-encrusted sword when you needed it?

Truth be told, my patience began to wane within about twenty minutes, as I had known it would. This was actually one reason I’d decided to try mudlarking in the first place, to remind myself to slow down, to savour the process of searching, and not to be so hung up on productivity or getting things done.

So I persevered, picking my way among rusty pieces of metal, crisp packets and drinking straws. We used to throw away 4.7 billion plastic straws, 316 million plastic stirrers and 1.8 billion plastic-stemmed cotton buds each year. Those numbers plummeted once they were banned: proof of the immediate impact that quick, simple law changes can have.

I stood up straight to stretch my back and to watch a ship pass down the river, filled with the romanticism of imagining all the places for which it might be bound. Nineveh, perhaps? But my maritime musings have become more accurate, if less exotic, since I downloaded the Marine Radar app, which tells you about any ships you see.

So this was the Maltese cargo ship Celestine sliding down the estuary with a salt-caked smoke stack and a cargo of cars. Heading in the other direction, a Dutch trailing suction hopper dredger slurped up the same gloop I was searching through. Dredgers work like monstrous vacuum cleaners, sucking up sand, mud and gravel from the channel to store onboard and discharge later. I wondered what gems had unknowingly been dumped through its pipes.

I bent down again and kept looking. Now I found a metal fork, a white comb and the compulsory shopping trolley. How did they end up in the river?

A discarded condom, unopened, told its tale of a disappointed date lobbing it off a bridge on his unplanned lonely trudge home to an empty bed. A golf putter, green with slime, had me imagining a pitch and putt rage, a nice day out soured by a tantrum and the golf club arcing through the summer sky into the water.

What else did I find? A pair of red pebbles caught my eye. A smooth, tactile fragment of green bottle marked ‘A.A. & Co’. Two symmetrical shards of tile. A fragment of porcelain decorated with blue and white lines, dots and circles.

That was about it.

This was actually one reason I’d decided to try mudlarking in the first place, to remind myself to slow down, to savour the process of searching, and not to be so hung up on productivity or getting things done.

But still, I was 99 percent certain that Christopher Columbus had dined off that very plate, munching corn on the cob as he set sail to discover Australia. One can always dream…

Even though I found no verifiable bullion or antiques, I had enjoyed trying to imagine stories for all the mundane objects I collected and brought home that morning. All these banal discoveries were grist to the mill as I learnt how to be an enthusiastic amateur. I was like the young boy Calvin in the comic strip, digging up the garden with Hobbes, his pet tiger. Hobbes asks Calvin what he has found.

‘A few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting grubs,’ answers Calvin from deep in his hole.
‘On your first try?’ asks Hobbes in delight.
‘There’s treasure everywhere,’ exclaims Calvin.

This is an excerpt from Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness by Alastair Humphreys. Available from Amazon and all good bookshops in the U.S., as well as directly from the publisher at www.eye-books.com.

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