The theme for my new book, From London with Love is mudlarking.  This is when people search the shoreline of tidal rivers for the little scraps of history – empty bottles, clay pipes, hand-made pins, almost anything - that the water has brought up. In the olden days (mudlarking has been going on for a very long time) the value of the finds was all important, but now it’s more about what we can learn from them.

I have two protagonists in this book, one of whom is Felicity, one of the children my character Alexandra looked after in A Wedding in Provence. It’s 1968 and Felicity has become a beautiful young woman, in London to be with her mother and to do a secretarial course.   

She meets a handsome young mudlarker, who lives on a barge and doesn’t have regular employment.
 
The second is Violet, a country mouse, dragged from her father’s house to Cheney Walk by her godmother.

Will these women find what they are looking for in Swinging London? Or are their dreams destined to remain buried deep in river mud?

I’ve had a lot of fun writing this book but one of the things I haven’t been able to do is to go mudlarking myself.  In the 1960’s when this book is set, anyone could go onto the foreshore when the tide was out and take whatever they found.  Now they need a licence and not even an experience mudlarker can escort anyone without this permission.  But I have read many books, watched many YouTube films and have a vivid imagination and I hope you’ll be as entranced by the whole thing as I have been.

Coming in February 2025

Lots of love

Katie