Southwark Cathedral are delighted to welcome Lara Maiklem the best-selling author of Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames as she discusses her new publication A Field Guide to Larking.

A Field Guide to Larking is a practical, interactive and inspiring guide to 'larking' from the bestselling author of Mudlarking. To lark is to get out and about, to explore the world around us and to discover the little treasures hiding in plain sight. We think, of course, of mudlarking but there is also beachlarking, fieldlarking or even simply exploring your own home with fresh eyes. In this beautiful field guide, Lara teaches us how to lark for ourselves. There are maps and charts, tips and lists, and colour illustrations throughout to help identify finds. From tide tables for mudlarkers to a flint guide for fieldlarkers, this book is richly informative and yet small enough to pop in a pocket. Like a journal it invites you to interact - to make notes and record finds along the way. If Lara Maiklem's first book was a glimpse into a hidden world, with this field guide she shows us how we can discover it for ourselves.

At present we will be releasing a small number of tickets in-case social distancing is still required on this date. Should it look like some or all restrictions are lifted which allow us to increase capacity then further tickets will be released from late June/early July.

Copies of A Field Guide to Larking will be available to purchase on the evening and can also be purchased in advance when ordering tickets - please choose the ticket/book option if you wish to reserve your copy and we hope that a book-signing will be possible.

Some social distancing measures will be in place to ensure all that join us feel comfortable. We would appreciate it if you continued to wear a face covering whilst at the event but it isn't mandatory.

If you can't attend the event then signed copies of A Field Guide to Larking can also be ordered from the Cathedral online store.

Lara Maiklem is a mudlark. She searches for lost and forgotten objects on the foreshore of the Tidal Thames, through central London and beyond. Among the thousands of things she has rescued from the mud are Tudor shoes, medieval pins, Roman pots, Georgian wig curlers and modern wedding rings.

Her first book, 'Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames' (Bloomsbury, 2019), is the story of the river told through the objects she has found and is a tale of obsession, tide-watching, mud-walking and endless hours of searching in all weathers. Mudlarking was a Sunday Times Bestseller, an Observer Book of the Year, Radio 4 Book of the Week and Winner of the 2020 Indie Book Award for Non Fiction. Her second book, A Field Guide to Larking: Beachcombing, Mudlarking, Fieldwalking and More, is an illustrated practical guide for those who want to search for themselves, whether on beaches (beachlarking), in fields (fieldlarking), houses (houselarking), gardens (gardenlarking) and of course mudlarking in rivers.

Lara grew up in the countryside, moved to London in the early 1990s and now lives a ten-minute walk from the beach on the east Kent coast. She has been mudlarking for almost 20 years and has spent a lifetime looking down for lost objects and interesting things. Lara has appeared on numerous radio and television programmes and has written about mudlarking for the Guardian, the Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Spectator and BBC Radio.