blue_mai

Date: Thursday 28th May 2026
Area searched: South Bank

Items found: pottery sherds, pieces of glass, two bottles, a Gameboy game, fake leaves, a cowrie shell.

A very hot evening, with many people on the foreshore, sitting on the sand, enjoying the weather.

I like the mysterious Game Boy game that it’s not possible to tell what game it was. I doubt it would still work though.

There’s a piece of a Dudson teapot there, the blue piece. Mosaic ‘pale blue’. https://ridgwaypatternbook.org.uk/other/dudsonpinetp.html

There’s a piece of ABC crockery (Aerated Bread Company), where only the A is visible.

The blue and white words are from G Phillips, Longport, who was in operation from 1834 to 1848. This broken piece of pottery could be almost 200 years old.

George Phillips:
https://www.thepotteries.org/allpotters/797a.htm

Edward & George Phillips' Pottery at Longport:
https://www.transferwarecollectorsclub.org/bulletin_previews/articles/09Winter-Longport.pdf

An R White’s bottle.

A Presta bottle.

Presta was made by Apollinaris and they made squashes and other drinks.

Apollinaris date back to 1852 in Germany and became the leading table water. The brand is now owned by Coca-Cola.

Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollinaris_(water)

Presta advert:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/1qqg13o/ad_poster_for_presta_sparkling_orange_and/#lightbox

Apollinaris company: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp122659/the-apollinaris-company-limited

This article, on page 14 of the PDF, has some interesting information on the Edenbridge Factory:
https://evmt.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/32-EVH-Newsletter-2018.pdf

In 1875, Apollinaris were listed at 19 Regent Street in London, originally as wine and spirit merchants, and then also mineral water.

The article says that they became Apollinaris and Presta
in 1932 and then Apollinaris and Co in 1952 until 1955, and they manufactured Presta squashes and table waters at Sardinia House, 52 Lincoln's Inn Fields.

So this bottle is probably at least 70 years old.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

squirmelia

I've started a new journal to post about mudlarking:
https://mudlarking.dreamwidth.org/

mudlarking

The Thames Invader is going to be on show at the Lewisham Arthouse in the 36 Hours exhibition from 1st - 6th June 2026. It is made from pottery sherds I found on the Thames foreshore.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

mudlarking

Date: Wednesday 27th May 2026
Area searched: South Bank

The sun shone on the day I returned to mudlarking. The waves, created by the boats, crashed onto the shore, and I stepped back, smiling, so glad that I’d got another chance to look for treasure.

This time I have a creative permit, so I'm looking at the foreshore differently - what can I make from this? Is this piece of china going to be a sail on a boat? Is this pretty coloured glass bottle going to be repaired with words? It's a fun thing to think about and my mind is buzzing with ideas.

Items found: Pottery sherds, pieces of glass, a glass bottle stopper, lipstick, an eraser, a button and a piece of a brush.

I like the glass bottle stopper, which is varying shades of green, that almost looks like it has been covered in algae, but I think it’s just where the glass has got damaged.

I wonder what words the eraser rubbed out.

One of the pieces of glass looks like it once said “ointment” on it, so would have been from a chemist.

Another has Western written on the base. I thought perhaps this was Western & Wolland as they sometimes used just “Western” on bottle stoppers, for example, but there are bottles that have Western written on the side, but R White’s on the bottom and R White’s bottlestoppers. So that doesn’t quite make sense, as R White’s was a rival to Western & Wolland. I have yet to find more details of Western than this.

The lipstick is pink and there is still some left in there, kind of soggy.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)

Reading

28.05.26 - South Bank

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(no subject)

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Mudlarking

The Thames Invader - 36 Hours

27.05.26 - South Bank

Testing needed in advance of code push!

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October 2020

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