If you had a Ferrari you would'nt take it to a back street local garage to be serviced would you..............you'd take it straight to Ferrari.............the Best !!!

You want to go on a one to one Mudlarking Tour & be taught how to Mudlark correctly..............you use the same principle above................so you go straight to Ferrari again..............nope thats wrong...........you come to me Steve the "Mud-God" Brooker the T.V Mudlark.........a kinda Mud Main dealer of the Thames and a real registered mudlark, fully registered Thames tour guide, Speaker & hands on history teacher trainer for councils all over the country.

You maybe just want a tour, maybe a new hobby, a birthday gift for a friend, anniversary prezzie for the wife, Christmas gift, works doo or you just ran over next doors cat so you wanna treat your neighbour to an outing with me as his now suicidal after Smokeys death.

Brush up on your Mudlarking skills if you already have a permit & lark already.................i still see so many people doing things that with a slight tweak can give you 10 fold better chances on your finds ratio's................if you're not finding give me a shout and lets see what your doing wrong and open up those elusive finding lines for you...................its easy when you know how and all one to one..............just you and your eyes.

I won't bore you to death on here but will send you all the info and gumph you'll ever need plus rules and regs for the Thames as you cannot search the Thames foreshore at all without a permit these days............it is now totally illegal to search the Thames foreshore without being licensed and a fee must be paid to the PLA just for you to walk onto the foreshore..............this too is in all the info that will be sent to you.

CONTACT THE MUD-GOD ON             stevebrooker62@gmail.com

'I always wanted to try mudlarking so contacted Steve "Mud God" Brooker from the history channels Mud Men and other television programs associated with the river Thames and registered mudlark & tour guide.

My friend from another department in the museum had gone on one of his one to one teaching trips on the foreshore and raved about it for days.

From the minute we met to five hours later steve talked non-stop about the history of the Thames, amazing stories, funny anecdotes and so so much more.

My friend had told me you could sit in the pub with this guy for ages and listen to his stories from the Thames and that he was exactly the same as he is on television.

He was right as i have never laughed so much or been so intrigued by wonderful tales and as my work partner said he feels like your best mate for those five hours.

This dynamic, surprise-a-minute, extremely atmospheric training session 

has certainly saved me so much time in acquiring the expert skills

and the eye searching techniques of a mudlarker on an ancient shore of the Thames. 

Steve Brooker or the Mud God's vivid lore about the Thames and its long history

poured into my ears, all while he jumped from spot to spot. 

Whilst walking the mud we looked at shifting stone/pebble finding lines, metal lines and then he showed me how  to look 

and where to look for fascinating finds just being sorted in size and weight by boat wave erosion.

Crucially, he taught me all the roles played by river currents, muds, 

sands and stones, and the pull and drag of waves and ships' wakes 

and the wind. But most important, he taught me how to discover, to

calculate and recognise "finding-lines" - that is, the lines along which the 

Thames waves sort and shift its treasures. 

We gazed through Henry VIII's palace rubbish dump and spotted Tudor nails notched and nicked with makers marks, black Tudor leather (still perfectly 

preserved) Tudor dress pins from a time when women wore 700 

pins a day in their clothes & hair and royalty wore thousands. Steve's stabbing eye spotted so many curios of

all ages, while his fingers scoured them with Thames grit to bring up their 

brightness.  

He identified everything - from WW2 Army helmet buckles

to a small medieval pilgrim's bell, from bullets to Victorian fly-buttons -

from pottery fragments of an Elizabethan Witch Pot (in one case, with 

the shield or escutcheon showing), from farthing to a Naafi spoon to an 18th century

button with a flower on it, from Elizabethan clay pipes to an exquisitely 

worked key-tag carrying a request to return the set to the Glasgow police.

As we walked along, he told me all about the buildings that had edged the 

shore - was it a wonder that, underneath where a Victorian school had stood, 

we found green marble-shaped glass stoppers from pop bottles lobbed in by 

the boys?  

Not only could he identify everything immediately, right across the

ages of time, but he could also give the full, deep background to that item -

draw a picture of it in its historical context. Like the ancient, dumped French 

100-frank coins clipped by the authorities to stop British dockers from reusing 

them in France.  He knew the makers of the sea-worn Victorian bricks and the years 

they'd been in business, and the history of shell-cases and munitions.

Modern stories of finds of colourful Indian religious offerings to the river (which often contain money) and also, finding voodoo offerings also chilled my spine. What with the lovely shore location, and the time travel from find to find, this long training session was the mother of all mudlarkings - no wonder Steve is nicknamed the Mud God. Highly recommended and i should know as i work in the museum and have sat through hundreds of lectures & talks and this was spectacular, entertaining, informative & very funny'.

Philippa M.