We diminish the rich ‘smellscapes’ of our cities with synthetic florals
Some years ago I was wandering around the Berlin department store KaDeWe, when I found some new scents on the Guerlain counter. Enticingly named “Les voyages olfactifs”, they were supposed to evoke journeys from Paris to an assortment of great cities – Moscow, New York, London, and so on. Charmed by the conceit, I put a squirt of Moscow on one wrist and London on the other, took a sniff – and was bitterly disappointed.
The house of Guerlain in its glory days was a master of olfactory narrative. Scents such as L’Heure Bleue and Vol de Nuit didn’t just smell nice, but told a story. Yet the brand’s idea of Moscow and London was nothing like mine. My Moscow smelt of cold fur, low-grade petrol and papirosi, those pungent cigarettes composed of several inches of hollow cardboard tube and a thumb’s-length of cheap tobacco. My London smells of diesel, lime flowers and stale beer, with a dank bottom note of the Thames.
The Guerlain versions – jasmine, pine needles and red currant for Moscow; grapefruit, rose and tea for London – were not the places whose smells I cherish.
My disappointment with those commercial scentportraits was inevitable: the sense of smell is as idiosyncratic as the memory for which it is so potent a trigger. But the idea that places have their own distinctive pong is one that has inspired the artist and designer Kate McLean to create “smellmaps” of cities including Edinburgh, Paris and Amsterdam.
In the hierarchy of the senses, smell has always ranked rather low. Plato thought sight the entry point for divine inspiration, while Martin Luther argued for hearing as the conduit for the word of God, and sceptical Diderot favoured evidence-based touch.
Our own society is particularly squeamish about what advertisers call “odours”. The modest whiffs of modern living are mild by comparison with the mephitic stench of life in earlier centuries – the muckheaps, raw sewage, rotting food scraps, decaying carcasses, foul tanneries and unwashed bodies. Yet we hunt them down and eradicate them with air-fresheners, deodorants and sickly scented candles, until it seems that the world has become an olfactory cacophony of synthetic florals.
McLean takes a more robust view of ambient smells. Sharing her pleasure of being led by the nose, she includes a “smellfie guide to smellwalking” to download from her website, sensorymaps.com. She recommends taking careful note of the scentscape that surrounds you, both the fragrant and the less so.
My London street is book-ended by a duo of sensory affronts: at one end a piece of waste ground used as a handy dump by flytippers; at the other, a Giles Gilbert Scott phone box pressed into ignoble service as a urinal.
When the Environment Secretary’s new litter strategy comes into force, I look forward to seeing flytippers in community payback jackets, clearing up the rubbish. A posse of the errant incontinent to scrub out the phone box would be good, too.
In the meantime, I am doing my best to embrace it as part of the rich olfactory palimpsest of my daily life, where a random Saturday might offer between breakfast and bedtime a pungent tone poem of coffee, petrol, hay, horse, bluebells, red diesel, muck-heap, London traffic, fish pie, lemon verbena soap and cotton sheets.
Do we have a sense of smell in our dreams, I wonder?