Tennis champion Peter Fleming still remembers the sickening moment he opened the door of his Wimbledon flat and saw drawers stripped, cabinets smashed and nine Wimbledon medals gone. “It’s a horrible feeling when you get burgled—you feel violated,” the four-time doubles champion told the PA news agency this month.
Six hours earlier he had left his new flat to play golf, neglecting to double-lock the door of what he thought was a secure building. The thieves ransacked the place and fled. While rifling through their loot, they found the medals with his name on, and as they were driving over Putney Bridge, threw them into the Thames.
It wasn’t until six months later that a licensed mudlark, combing the foreshore below Putney Bridge at low tide, felt something heavy in the silt: a fist-sized clump of metal discs—some bright as the day they were struck, others crusted green. He reported potential “treasure” to the London Museum, whose curators traced the inscription and phoned an astonished Fleming.
Those medals now feature in the intriguing Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London’s Lost Treasures, which opened this week, the first major exhibition devoted to the river’s scavengers and their finds.
From tennis heist to 3,000 years of river secrets
The exhibition brings more than 350 foreshore objects together. Visitors enter an immersive “river bank” gallery before stepping through four thematic zones—food, faith, crime and everyday life—then end beneath a glowing lunar installation that links tides to discovery.
A blog by curator Kate Sumnall has picked out five must-see artefacts. Among them:
- Shadwell Shams – Victorian fakes sold as genuine Roman and medieval artefacts and cast by mudlark con-artists Billy Smith and Charley Eaton, whose counterfeit pilgrim badges duped scholars and still fool collectors today.
- Memento-mori rosary bead (15th c.) – a pea-sized carving that shows a serene woman’s face on one side and a skull on the other: a medieval reminder to “remember you must die.”
- Loaded bone dice (late 15th c.) – 24 tiny cubes, X-rayed to reveal mercury weights and duplicated numbers, proving that cheating at games is nothing new.
And, of course, Fleming’s gold-and-silver medals gleam beside a sawn-off shotgun barrel and a Tudor dagger in the “Crime on the River” case—an eloquent reminder that the Thames has been London’s dumping ground for wrongdoing since Roman times.
Putney’s own mudlark hall of fame
And while Fleming’s medal discovery is relatively recent, they are far from the only interesting objects that have surfaced in Putney’s stretch of river. Others include:
- A Roman brothel token (1st century AD)—a bronze “spintria” showing an explicit scene, dug up by amateur detectorist Regis Cursan beside Putney Bridge; the only one of its kind ever found in Britain.
- An Act-of-Union clay pipe bowl (1801)—a finely carved commemorative pipe bearing the royal arms, discovered on the Putney foreshore in 2019, a stone’s throw from William Pitt the Younger’s former home.
- Anglo-Saxon fish-trap posts and prehistoric peat beds—still poking from the mud between Putney and Fulham, visible at the lowest tides and attesting to 1,500 years of river-bank industry.
These finds underline why mudlarks queue for years to secure a foreshore permit: Putney’s tides routinely cough up objects spanning Roman Londinium to Edwardian industry—and the occasional modern crime caper.
Whether you come for a Wimbledon whodunnit, a Roman brothel token or a counterfeit pilgrim badge, Putney’s own riverbed treasures now anchor an exhibition that proves the Thames is still London’s greatest storyteller—twice a day, every falling tide.
The Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London’s Lost Treasures exhibition is open daily 10am-5pm until 1 March 2026 at the London Museum Docklands, No 1 Warehouse, West India Quay, E14 4AL. Entry is £16.
I remember when the Roman brothel token was found. There was some local pearl-clutching at the thought that there might once have been a brothel in Putney. In much more recent times there was one here, allegedly!