The sacred mud of the Thames, a door in time to the London of the Romans and beyond

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To explain

, by Lara Maiklem (Captain Swing, on sale Monday) it's worth knowing a few facts: first, London's docks on the Thames were built with the debris of the medieval city:

... Second: the mud of the river, due to its composition, low in oxygen, is very conducive to preserving antiquities.

And third and even more surprising and important: the Thames has two tides a day.

The ebb and flow of the sea reaches far beyond central London, allowing objects deposited in the dikes and riverbed since the days of Roman Londinium to surface at low tides.

And that is what Lara Maiklem has dedicated a good part of her life to, a girl raised on a farm who arrived in London when she was beginning her adulthood and who,

.

30 years later, Maiklem converts her experiences as

, as a tracker in the mud, in an unusual and evocative book in which the small treasures that the river has offered her connect their stories like poetic articles in a digital encyclopedia.

Thus, a spoon that appears in Greenwich explains diet and public health in London in the sixteenth century;

a doll narrates the consideration of childhood in the 19th century;

and the casing of a bomb that never exploded evokes the bombing raids of the Battle of London.

The city, more than a palimpsest, appears as a hypertext.

"The Thames is a strange place. I mean... I was in Paris in the autumn and I took a good walk along the Seine and it's all so beautiful... The Thames, on the other hand, is hard. It's majestic and powerful, we can say that there is nobility in its toughness, but it is not pretty," says Maiklem.

"There's not much color, everything around the Thames is a gray scale... But then I go down to the shore and I get a very deep sense of time. Somehow, the Thames tells us that it's been here since before the human beings existed and that it will continue to flow when we are gone, when the city does not exist. And that is part of a poetic emotion, let's put it that way. Many artists have come to the Thames, even if it was to hate it, as happened to Charles Dickens.

.

They say my book is a love letter to the river and, I don't know, I don't think I wrote it with that idea in mind, but maybe it's true."

Important: what lights up Maiklem is the river, not the city, which is the landscape in the background.

"It's that the city is the river. Londoners forget about the Thames. It's always there, it's everywhere and they ignore it. Until one day they remember it, they start to think about it and the city blurs behind It is London that is a bypass of the Thames. In the photographs from space, London is a shapeless blur but the river is perfectly visible. The river

, defines the movements... It is the most important thing of the city," says Maiklem.

"When I lived in London, the river was where I went to escape the city. Now that I live outside, it's the river that keeps me connected to London."

What

?

Would it have been the same story?

"No, because only the Thames has two tides a day that bring out its history. The Thames is not just the river, it is the history of millions of people who were the city and then were forgotten, who left nothing more than a hindrance to hair, than a knife, than a mismatched shoe... And that's all that unites us with them. There are other wonderful rivers like the Tiber, but

."

An important part of

is the portrait of the intimacy of the river.

Maiklem spends some of his best pages talking about the cold, the smell, the texture of the mud... the physicality of the Thames.

"I have come to know the river as I know some friends,

... The smells, for example, are very important, because they are very changeable, they depend on the moment and the place. The same it happens with the swell, with the shine... Sometimes the Thames is opaque and sometimes

.

The curious thing is that, in that intimacy, there is a moment in which the cyclical movement matters more than the flow of the river.

I have come to see the Thames as a breathing body rather than a constant flow of water."

Isn't that the sea?

Don't people have that kind of fascination with the oceans?

"Now I live in front of the sea and it's not the same," says Maiklem.

"Of course it is very relaxing to walk on a beach, which can be a wonderful form of meditation, very sensory and the sea is always beautiful... But I think it does not have the complexity,

. The The sea is like a teenager, which is sometimes low and sometimes erupts; the Thames, on the other hand, is something more subtle, those changes exist but they appear wrapped in a veil of mystery".

The story of

begins in England, somewhere to the west of London that is more country than city, and ends almost at sea, in a port on the Thames estuary called Tilbury that now receives the shipping traffic that once went to Bankside and It

England

.

"Tilbury is land reclaimed from the estuary that has been filled in with rubbish."

And modern trash remains Tilbury's theme: "Plastics, surplus from consumer society, remnants of this culture of mass production and overabundance...

, is a horrible reflection of what we are: toxins and waste that cannot be assimilated by nature...", says Maiklem. The Thames, which in the 50s was declared biologically dead due to the toxicity of its waters, was rehabilitated in the 1960s and today it's cleaner and teeming with animal life than ever... Just as London today seems a city far from poverty and squalor, but that bubble of well-being doesn't mean that poverty and filth have They've just been pushed out of sight.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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