Smell walks

The only thing nowadays that reminds me of Sheffield, where I was born, is the smell you sometimes get on a blustery day when the wind gets down the chimneys and dislodges the old sooty smell of a coal fire. If Proust had been raised in South Yorkshire instead of Paris 'e'd 'ave said the same. And À la recherche du temps perdu would have been a very different book. 

Anyway....the smellscape of Sheffield is the subject of this post at Edible Geography (via): one of those strange quirky delights that make the life online so interesting. A smell walk! What a wonderful idea. The report of this particular Sheffield smell walk, led by the enterprising Victoria Henshaw, includes pictures not only of the Henderson's Relish factory, an obvious target for the smell-seeker, but - you have been warned - the inevitable vomit-on-the-pavement. 

Some interesting discussions. The gender difference with respect to smell, it seems, may be less to do with perception - Henshaw reckons men and women have pretty much the same sensitivity - and more to do with the female inclination to profess disgust with considerably greater force and frequency than their menfolk. It's something, frankly, I've long suspected.

Then there's the smoking ban and its effect on our perception. In the old days, even after I'd given up cigarettes, I'd barely notice smoke in pubs. Yet one week after the ban was in force I was in a pub in Northumberland and the smell of stale tobacco that clung to the place was quite overwhelming - and quite nauseating. Why should that be?

What was interesting was that a lot of my smell walkers talked to me about how they are actually more annoyed now by experiencing cigarette smoke in the street than they were by it in the pubs, because in the pubs it was expected to be in there and it belonged, and they don’t think it belongs in the street in the same way. That seems to be part of the current mindset: we’ve sanitized our urban environments to such a degree that any experience that’s out of our control, we automatically react negatively to it.

Also...Auld Reekie.

 

Comments

[Noga]

Mick, I'm without speech. You actually read "À la recherche du temps perdu" ??

[Mick H]

Well, a reference to Proust is almost obligatory when you're talking about smell and memory, though I doubt that many of those bringing his name up have actually read him. But yes, I did read À la recherche. Long time ago now. Absolutely worth it.