WHAT’S THAT SMELL?
The team at Langley Castle, a medieval Northumbrian castle hotel, have put their hands up in horror after discovering that their resident ghost, Maud, is probably called Agnes! All who have seen the apparition tell of a woman sobbing uncontrollably and heading towards a window. She is said to look back with a tear-stained face, then jump . . .
This ghost was thought to be Maud de Lucy, said to be broken-hearted when her knight husband was killed in battle, and who, on hearing the news of his death, jumped from the castle’s highest window. But after having the time to research further during lockdown, it transpired that the supposedly heartbroken Maud actually remarried the same year as her first husband’s death (1381) and didn’t pass away until 1398!
Maud’s father, Sir Thomas de Lucy, who built Langley Castle, actually had two wives: Maud’s mother, Margaret, and then Agnes de Beaumont, whose death is shrouded in mystery. Is Agnes, then, the restless spirit who roams the rooms?
Maybe it’s the fact that people have been calling her by the wrong name that’s made her sob!
We know a fair bit about the Victorian era, but until now the pungent aromas that characterised London’s streets have been lost.
That’s all about to change, thanks to a new exhibition at the History of Science Museum in Oxford. Created by the Institute of Digital Archaeology, this fantastic show will immerse you in a virtual reality tour of the city’s stinkiest streets, from Spitalfields to the banks of the Thames, and even some parts of Chelsea, through an electronic nebuliser and scratch and sniff cards.
As reported in The Telegraph, smells that Victorian Londoners would have found familiar are: horses, coal smoke pouring from chimneys, lye soap in laundries that lined the Thames and tallow candles made from animal fat. They’re even recreating the acrid smell of an east London opium den as depicted by Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.
Some smells won’t be there, among them pipe tobacco, the waft of the Bermondsey tanneries that used dog faeces to make leather supple and the smell of Smithfield meat market.
“Tobacco seemed like a bad idea around children,” said Roger Michel, the IDA’s executive director, “and we could not get a non-sickening but accurate butcher’s smell.”
The Victorians didn’t just raise a stink, though – turn to page 43 to read about the more refined aromas of our capital’s perfume heritage that once led the world.
Age of Odour, History of Science Museum, Broad Street, Oxford
OX1 3AZ. hsm.ox.ac.uk;
01865 277 293. Dates TBC.