Anna Borzello, Dancing on the Foreshore, Part 1

In this episode, Anne Marie talks to  Anna Borzello. Previously, she worked as the BBC correspondent for Focus in Africa in Uganda from 1995 to 2001. These days you can find Anna on the River Thames foreshore foraging for historical artifacts which tell the story of London’s expansive history.

Anna admittedly plans her life around the river’s tides. Before she commits to doctor’s appointments, lunch dates, fill in the blank, she first consults the tide charts. Low tide wins out every time. It was such a pleasure to talk to Anna about her experiences as a mudlark along the Thames foreshore, and I think you will see why, not only is she well-versed on London’s history,  she is absolutely delightful!

Instagram: @foreshoreseashore
Anna Borzello on reporting for Focus: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08njxld

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By: Gold-Tiger
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Transcript

Anne Marie Cannon: 1:24

Hello fellow armchair historians, Anne Marie here. Today I talked to Ana Barcelo. Previously, she worked as a BBC correspondent for focus in Africa in Uganda from 1995 until 2001. These days, you can find Anna on the River Thames foreshore foraging for historical artifacts, which tell the story of London's expansive history. Anna admittedly plans her life around the rivers tides. Before she commits to doctor's appointments, lunch dates, fill in the blank. She first consults the tide charts. Low tide wins out every time. It was such a pleasure to talk to Ana, about her experiences as a mudlark along the Thames foreshore and I think you will see why not only is she well versed on London's history, she is absolutely delightful. Anna Borzello, welcome to armchair historians.

Anna Borzello: 2:32

Thank you very much. I'm thrilled to be here.

Anne Marie Cannon: 2:35

I'm thrilled to have you because you're going to be talking about one of my most favorite things in the whole entire world. So we just really get right off into the races. And I'm going to ask you the question, What is your favorite history that we're going to be talking about today,

Anna Borzello: 2:51

we're going to be talking about mud locking, which is, well, it's my hobby, but that doesn't really express what I feel about it enough. It's more like a way of life and mud locking is when I go down to the river. And I searched the exposed for sure, which is the difference between low and high tide for objects that have been lost or dropped or dumped some time in London's 2000 year old history. And I searched for those objects and then I researched them and somehow retrieve the past through investigating them.

Anne Marie Cannon: 3:27

So yeah, some of my listeners who have been listening to me for a while, have heard some of the other interviews I've done with my blogs, they know that I'm obsessed, Jason Sandy, sigh finds and the like so that's really helpful that you kind of prefaced what it is that you do. It's specifically when you talk about mud larking, you're talking about the town's

Anna Borzello: 3:50

Well, I'm talking about the terms but it's really searching any tidal river for objects that have been lost in the mud, you're retrieving these objects from from the riverbed.

Anne Marie Cannon: 4:00

So how did you get involved in mob larking? How did you find out about it? What was your evolution.

Anna Borzello: 4:09

But I grew up in London, and I've always been drawn to the Thames and I spent a lot of time around the Thames when I was a teenager. I remember dancing on the foreshore with friends when I was a teenager and being brokenhearted, and seeking solace by the terms. And at some point, the notion that there were objects on the foreshore entered my mind, but I'm still not clear. When or how that happened. I had a chat with my dad. And he said at some point, maybe in the 80s, a friend took him down to the riverside and told him about clay pipe stems. And I think you told me and that's maybe how the idea got embedded and then slowly evolved. In the 90s 1999, there was a huge exhibition of mud locked objects by an artist called Mark Dion, at the Tate in London. And I remember going into that exhibition and thinking I should really get down to the foreshore and start searching soon before everybody goes, but at the time, I was living in Sub Saharan Africa. And when I got back, I had kids, and I'm a single parent, so I was watching them the whole time. And it was only eight years ago, when the children were firmly in school that I thought now is a time just to follow that hunch and that instinct and go and discover what's on the foreshore. So I went down with a group I think called the Thames explorer trust, who took groups down for a sort of like little look around. It's like an educational tool for three hours. And then from then on, I just took it like a job really put on a pair of Wellington boots and parked the car and every day I'd go down wherever I could to search the foreshore for objects, and it became has become a way of life since then.

Anne Marie Cannon: 5:48

Would you say it's an obsession?

Anna Borzello: 5:51

I think that nearly everyone who made logs will say it was an obsession. I mean, I my life is really ruled by timetable but by the tide tables, so I get the tide tables. I work out even before this interview, I worked out whether you crashed with a low tide. If you had, we would not be talking time. When I'm talking on the phone to the doctor. They'll say oh yeah, there's an appointment at nine o'clock and I'll just say hold on. I just have to consult my diary. And then I look up the title tables because you never know if there's a really good load side, you don't want to miss it. And I know that I'm not the only mudlark who thinks that way. Our holidays are also planned around tide. So it is the tide sort of begin to rule your life. And then you discover other people in the community and your friendships grow. And then these objects begin to take over your house and hold mental space and your reading. So yes, it's, it's an obsession, I think that's fair to say,

Anne Marie Cannon: 6:45

well, and the way that I discovered you is, I have been following my blogs for a couple years now on line. And of course, I watch Nicola white, do her YouTube videos, and sci fi ins and I also love jewels, guides. And so in the background of these videos, I see this woman, and she catches my attention. And I noticed that you are hanging out with all the cool kids in London, those are the people that I would be hanging out with if I lived there. And so I was like, Who is this person? And, you know, I started following you on Instagram, and you have a great Instagram page. So the one thing that we should probably talk about is that, and I'm not sure when they, they implemented this, but you can't just go to the foreshore and forage, you have to have what they call a foreshore permit.

Anna Borzello: 7:41

Well, when I started, which was late 2015, you could search if you were just looking with your eyes alone, if you want to disturb the surface in any way you needed a license. And then in 2017, that was changed the Port of London Authority who regulates all that all the all the foreshore said no, if you have to have a license for any form of searching, and at the time, there were only 200 licenses, there's been a massive boom in the popularity of mudlark. And there's now 5000 licenses issued. In fact, there's so many licenses issued that they've been temporarily suspended. So it's not possible to get new ones you can, you can use the license you've got or a new and old one. But for the moment, they're evaluating what's happening and trying to work out the best way to to ensure that the foreshore is protected. The vast majority of us are very respectful of the foreshore. And we all love what we do. And it really matters to us. And we feel like we're saving history, a lot of us it's not just for ourselves, it feels like you're recovering London's history. So we hope that whatever the resolution is, is beneficial for all.

Anne Marie Cannon: 8:45

While it seems reasonable, it does seem reasonable that they're doing that I'm just grateful that I did get my permit back in 2000. And I think it was 19. And it's coming up for re after renew it. Actually it expires while I'm in London in May. So I just need to keep that up so that I don't lose that option. Now we know a little bit about my blogging, and we know a little bit about your evolution about how you got into it. Can you tell me about you know, something particular a find or a particular grouping of objects that you're especially interested in? And can you tell us the history about those things?

Anna Borzello: 9:26

I can, it's quite complicated because I I sort of love all my objects. But I think of them in two kinds of categories. There are the objects which connect to a particular person. So for example, the traders tokens that you get that were issued in the middle of the 17th century, when shopkeepers were able to use the Royal Mint to basically get little tokens that they could use for small change and make their mark on them. And when you get one of those tokens, you can discover who the person that issued, the more that who the person was that had that token issued, and where they lived and what they did. And you researched them I found one recently he was a Quaker, he was imprisoned, he had a wife called Anna. And these people come back to life for a moment. It's like you pull them out of the mud and you say, you know, these people were long gone, these ordinary people. And now they live again for this brief moment. And then there's another category of objects, which I like because for me, they bring the past alive in a way that my history lessons never occurred. I just studied history at we have to specialize in England from 16 to 18. And history was one of the subjects I chose. And it for some reason, history never came alive. For me. It was like looking at shadows on the wall that people weren't real. I couldn't connect with their emotions. I couldn't imagine what their lives were like. And yet when you find, for example, dress pins, of which I have 15,000 In fact, I have them near me somewhere or here they are I'm gonna I'm going to shake them. You can hear them in their little shot here. 1000 dress pins when you find those, and you begin to wonder why they're there. And then you realize, as you find them that these were objects that were the part of the furniture of the past for hundreds of years, London has lived with these pins and the pins weren't the kind of throw away, who cares about the items that we have now, in the 15th century, these pins were so valuable because the metal that they were made out of was quite hard to come by that they were actually bequeathed in wills. And I worked out that you could 100 pins would buy you 33 sheep was same amount of money, that's how valuable they were. And then metal became more available, and the price went down. But they were still really important items, trade wars over the big arguments with the French over them, people trying to regulate their quality, Queen Elizabeth, the first of England had a royal pin maker, you know, her clothes were completely held together by these objects she had, I think her most elaborate dress had 10,000 pins, keeping it together, then you realize she needed to have servants to keep them together, then you realize it whenever she moved, maybe she was pricked. And you think about these people in the past that irritation of having those pins come loose and pricking your skin, and that you must have had those pins on your dressing table. And you'd need a server to pin you into your clothes. So somehow, through these little tiny objects, the the feeling of what it was like to live in certain periods of history comes alive. And I find that really fascinating. Also, actually, pins are amazing, because they've gone from being a really high value item to being a really low value item. And when you trace that you get this whole sort of economic evolution as well. You can basically trace the history of England for 600 years through this little tiny common object. So these different sorts of objects and different categories of objects speak to me in in different in different ways.

Anne Marie Cannon: 13:00

That's amazing. I love the way you describe that. I've heard of the pins. I didn't find anyone I was there last year, but how do they end up in the Thames? So many of them? Is it just because, you know, they're precariously held into place? And then they fall off your skirts? Or how does that work?

Anna Borzello: 13:21

I think first of all, there were loads of them around. So there are loads of them, though everybody had them. They were such a common object that you know, by the 19th century, 18th century, there were factories, I mean, workshops in Britain producing them, Britain was a great producer of pins, people would they were just falling out of clothes, and then they were falling out clothes on the street. And then the water drains, they were flowing down onto the river, you know, along with the rivulets of water coming down through the drain. So they just gathered, and then the river sorts by weight. So it'll sort all the pins into various sections. So if you find one pin, you're going to find the load of other pins in the same area.

Anne Marie Cannon: 13:58

Oh, wow. So what would you say is your most precious find today?

Anna Borzello: 14:08

It's really hard for me to answer that question. Because I'm attached to so many of my finds, I often remember the sort of joy of finding them. And that's like mixed in with the object itself. So I don't think that I can select whatever I do select, I often choose my, my collection of pins just because of all the labor that went into finding them. But the moment I'm really taken by something I found two months ago, just because it was so unusual. I mean, nobody else seems excited by it. It's a little object made out of pipe clay, and it's round, and it's a mold and it's got initials on it. And it was used to imprint, you know, to imprint in something and to leave this seal someone's initials, but I don't know what it was used for. But through investigating it, I had to go through the whole idea of whether it was a seal for glass bottle, or whether it was a maker's mark on pottery. And then I got led down this whole path of Mayberry. It was used to decorate cakes and biscuits and marzipan and butter in the 18th century when they were crazy about decorating their foods. And so that really appealed to me because it was just a little avenue I hadn't been down. So I'm not, I can't really choose a favorite item. I can also say that yesterday I was sent something by a friend. And it turned out that one of my friends had been put in a book of the portable antiquities scheme and it was chosen as one of the objects that have been found that was of interest in that year. I really interested in clay pipes which littered the foreshore. And I've got very many of them. And this particular clay pipe stood out to me because it didn't make sense. It didn't fit the typography. And it also didn't have it wasn't made of the same white hard clay. And it turned out to be of Native American design. Central London. Yeah. And it's really bizarre and when I put it on a clay pipe Facebook page, the Americans went crazy. They were so excited. I got this this little pipe in England it was so bizarre. They don't turn up in England at all. Often it was very unusual, which is why I ended up in this being recorded being selected in the this year and it's because As I think partly because the clay is not very good quality. So it's friable, and it would break, but I imagined that what happened was sometime in the 17th century, some sailor was in colonial, you know, Jamestown, and he got this pipe and he got on a boat and came back to England, they got swept overboard with the rubbish and ended up here. But what's interesting about it is apparently, it's a mix of two, Native American design. So it must have been a time when maybe different groups weren't converging in the town center. And those influences were changing as sort of a mishmash of different designs. So I really liked that it's really interesting.

Anne Marie Cannon: 16:55

So tell me, tell us, for my listeners that don't know, tell me about the clay pipes and what they are and why they're so plentiful.

Anna Borzello: 17:06

So clay pipes, kind of magical objects. So basically, the cigarette ends of yesteryear. So no one's going to get excited by a horrible little filter that you find today, or even vapes, which unfortunately, litter the foreshore today, but the clay pipes are beautiful. They're like bones, they're so hard the the white clay. And they are, they were basically disposable throw away cigarettes since I used it and grow from about 50 and 80. So So Walter Rallo, went off to the Americas and discovered the Native American smoking tobacco there, brought it back to England and introduced it to the court. And it took off. And at the beginning, the little clay pipes we had here were very small, because tobacco was expensive. And as tobacco became more plentiful, unfortunately, because of the slave trade, and that the price went down. And the key platforms get bigger. And soon everybody was smoking in England, they were smoking, you know, young people were smoking and all people, women, children were smoking. And you often get these clay pipes on the foreshore at points where people congregate, I sort of think of it as like when people get on the bus, and they put out their cigarette and they grind under their feet. So you might get it outside taverns, or on a ferry point, you might get a lot of these old clay pipes in the waves. And actually, as the waves go in and out, the clay pipes bang against each other, and they make a tinkling sound. It's rather beautiful. They're sort of like old, but they're like very beautiful white bones. And there's also this amazing chiming sound as they move through the waves.

Anne Marie Cannon: 18:40

Oh, that's interesting. I've never heard of that. They are very strong. I did find a couple when I was there. And I found one of the really old ones with the small ball. It was pretty broken up, though. But I've never heard that about them making that sound,

Anna Borzello: 18:59

when it's only when there's a lot of them. And so it used to be that you'd get very, very many of them, and now has many more mud locks have less pipes around. Yeah, but still on a low tide, when even the little pipe stems Tinker in the water. It's a lovely sound.

Anne Marie Cannon: 19:13

It sounds like it would be okay, so you can't pick your favorite child.

Anna Borzello: 19:20

I can't pick my favorite child. But I have, I have just idea I have too many of them, I get very excited by my finds. So what I love about these finds, as you get them you get excited. And that by the process of finding is exciting. And then you take it home and then you clean it up and photograph it and then research it, and then maybe put it on a Facebook page, like for example, the clay pipe Facebook page, and people chime in and they tell you a little bit about the history of that object. And by the end, you've built up a little window into a little part of the past. And over time you get this really intriguing view of the past as viewed through these objects that you found on the foreshore.

Anne Marie Cannon: 20:01

Can I see your shelves? Were you shown to me? Oh, wow. That's amazing. Do you ever have to get rid of things? Or how do you like keep collecting these things?

Anna Borzello: 20:16

I collect these objects. And then I choose the ones I like the best and put them on the shelves I sought them out. I've got loads of beads here I must have about 1000 beads. So the beads go into the bead section the marbles into the marble section. I've got a selection of false keys here.

Anne Marie Cannon: 20:32

Oh my word. Let me say, oh, oh my goodness. She's not even kidding. She has false teeth.

Anna Borzello: 20:40

Yeah, those are I mean, there's a whole intro you know about false teeth. These false teeth were these like NHS issues. So they'd be post 1950 I got I dread to think how those ended up on the terms and maybe they were flushed down the toilet. But then you get the older kind here which is vulcanized rubber, which is from the late Victorian times late 19th century. I mean these are really unpleasant I can't see. Well, it's a much harder sort of rabbit it's got a weird texture to it like old ham. Attractive. And then of course you ended up researching the History of false teeth and realize that there's this incredible history that goes right back to Waterloo teeth, which is when the people would go off to the battlefields of the Battle of Waterloo and pull teeth from the mouth of the dead, then take them back to the dentist in London, you could use them as false teeth, you know, of high quality for those who could afford it in Britain. So it's sort of intriguing how these things evolve. Every fine takes you on a little journey like that. Anyway, you asked me what I do. So I tend to sort things out, you can see but your listeners can't that I've got a assortment here of pottery that's been marked with the fingerprints of the potter. Can you see that? Yeah. So that's the thumb mark of someone from 500 years ago, and you can slip your finger into the little depression that they've made and feel feel the past that way feel their finger marks. But then every so often I'll I'll go to the fall short thing. I don't know why I've picked up this stuff. And I'll put it in a bag and then I just take it back. And I do try and take it back to a place that's appropriate. So I wouldn't dump a load of Victorian stuff in an area that normally throws up Georgian artifacts, because that would just be, I don't know, it just doesn't feel right. And at the moment, I actually have a whole bag in the car. It's quite heavy. And it's all mixed up of stuff. And I have an idea of where I'm going to drop it. And then hopefully someone will find some of the objects.

Anne Marie Cannon: 22:42

That is interesting.

Anna Borzello: 22:44

It feels right to to bring it back. Yeah, I mean, I suppose I suppose theoretically, you could put it in the garbage because it's in the Thames because it's trash. So in a way, if you put it in the trash is going to end up in another trash place, you know, inland. But I still feel that it's if you take it from the river, you should put it back to the river. And I know I'm not the only one that feels that way. But yeah, I will take it back. So that's what I do with excess objects. And so for example, I've got loads of pipes, and there's hundreds here. I don't know if you can see them. Yeah, I do. And with those pipes, I tend to swap them out. So if I get a long pipe, I'll take a less long pipe and put that one back.

Anne Marie Cannon: 23:23

Oh, that's interesting. I love that.

Anna Borzello: 23:27

But then there's also a pleasure not just in the history of the objects, but there's a, there's an there's a pleasure in collecting things. So I do like the accumulation of objects, like the accumulation of these marbles here, say, all these tests arrive, or these buttons. And there's something that I like, I think what I like about the accumulation is that they accumulate because there were so many of them. And so the fact that there's so many of them is because they were part of everybody's life at this particular period of history. So again, it brings back into my brings back into my imagination, the idea that these objects were part of someone's world that in, in Victorian Britain, everybody would use that stoneware, for example, you know, that would have been common, you'd have had ink on your table in a stoneware bottle.

Anne Marie Cannon: 24:14

You know, one of the things you've talked about, which I think is the thing, it's that tangibility of touching the past, and who was the last person that held that item in their hand, and it fell away from them. And this is the first time it's like, it's almost like being in a time machine, right like that, to be able to touch that history and imagine it and you have a very good imagination, the way that you've drawn out some of you know the ideas about the pins, for example, that was amazing. And, you know, it just it does seem like it takes a special not a special but a certain kind of person to appreciate that. We're going to stop here for today, but be sure to join us next week for part two of my interview with Anna bordello. In the meantime, be sure to check out our episode notes to find out more about Anna and mud larking and how to support the show. Thanks for joining us have a great week. armchair historians is produced by Belgian rabbit productions, hosted by Anne Marie cannon music this week is strings by gold Tiger sound editing and designed by Anne Marie cannon