FRG Meetings

Our meetings - open to all but with preferential rates for members - are held regularly and include one-day events focusing on themes related to the identification and interpretation of small finds. With no regional bias, FRG meetings are made accessible to the widest membership and are held across Britain and Ireland and beyond. Venues have included Dublin, Durham, Edinburgh, the Isle of Man, Lincoln, Liverpool, London, Orkney and Perth; with our most recent gatherings in Plymouth, Devizes and at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. Our short trips to museums to view exhibitions have taken us to Paris, Nuremberg, the Netherlands and London and Glasgow.

We co-host meetings with other finds study groups and societies - such as the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, the Roman Finds Group, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, Instrumentum and the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland - and with professional bodies, in order to widen our network and encourage information exchange. These have proved very popular and productive in the past. We hope to continue these collaborations and welcome suggestions from groups for future joint meetings and conferences.

Details of future (and recent) FRG Meetings will be listed below...

'The Mudlark Experience: Researching finds from the River Thames'

Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th of November 2025

Purchase tickets here (£20 for FRG members and £25 for non-members): "eventbrite: The Mudlark Experience"

The FRG is delighted to announce that our 2025 meeting will be held at London Museum Docklands. We are planning the programme around the very successful "Secrets of the Thames, Mudlarking London’s lost treasures", which brings together a fantastic array of 350 objects, many of which are on display for the first time. As well as an opportunity to see the exhibition from a curator’s perspective, we will hear about the fascinating research undertaken by the mudlarking communities themselves.

The main meeting will be on Saturday 15th at London Museum Docklands. As well as the talks, the ticket price will include general access to the exhibition "Secrets of the Thames, Mudlarking London’s lost treasures” and a limited number of spaces on curator-led tours by Kate Sumnall and Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) Finds Liaison Officer Stuart Wyatt. Tea and coffee will be available morning and afternoon.

Stuart Wyatt has lined up some exciting talks exploring business rivalry, marginalised lives, sensuous materialism and other themes, as glimpsed through mudlarked finds from the Thames.

Stuart himself will focus on 16th-17th century Wood and Pewter knife scabbards from Britain.

Malcolm Russell, author of ‘Mudlark’d: Hidden Histories from the River Thames’, will show how objects from the Thames reveal the lives of marginalised people in "Unholy Rites: Finding the Birth of the British Drug Underground in the River Thames".

In his talk, "Small Change in Muddy Waters", Jason Sandy, board member of the exclusive Society of Thames Mudlarks & Antiquarians, will throw light on a bitter feud at the heart of the Doves Press which led to the celebrated Doves-type being thrown into the Thames at dead of night.

PhD researcher and mudlark, Tom Chivers, will share his current research into the sensuous materialism of objects found in the river, focusing on clay tobacco pipes.

Other speakers include mudlarks Monika Buttling-Smith and Sean Clarke and Students from the Lost and Found project.

A guided foreshore walk with Stuart Wyatt will take place on the morning of Sunday 16th; exact time and place to be confirmed. This walk will have limited availability. For those who have not seen the exhibition on the Saturday, there will be an opportunity for you to visit the exhibition on Sunday (self-guided).

Attendees will be able to sign-up for the curator-led tours of the exhibition and the Thames foreshore guided walk on the day of the conference.

It's going to be an engaging and interesting couple of days and we really look forward to seeing you there!