The Mud Dredger challenges the forgotten relationship between the city of London and the river Thames. The river is seen as a metaphor for time travelling in a non-linear way and incessantly back-and-forth. The Thames’ anaerobic mud preserves, conceals and, at propitious times, reveals. These gifts are chosen with discerning yet enigmatic purposes and values. In contrast, the design proposes a mud dredging building that carefully selects and curates the river’s leftovers and contributes to improving the river’s health.

When arguing that architecture is a time traveller, it is possible to contend that a building can curate the past, inform the present and imagine the future. As a form of assemblage of different age materials, architecture can further recast our understanding of the past to elucidate the future. By reimagining the Roman technique of spolia (the repurposing of buildings’ stones for new constructions) into the contemporary idea of waste, reuse and discard, the design aims to reconnect the city to some of its lost or overlooked accounts, or in other words, to its unloved spolia.