The Nose: A London Story
Pity the poor, neglected nose. We don’t often think about what we smell, especially as London’s scents frequently tend towards the rank, (as anyone who’s had the misfortune of enduring the rush-hour squeeze on a sweaty summer day, can testify). We end up wilfully ignoring our olfactory sense, even though its main organ sits in the middle of our face.
Efforts to ignore unpleasant smells have quite literally shaped London’s geography. In the summer of 1858, a full 165 years ago, a combination of poor Victorian sewage disposal and extreme heat caused the Thames to, in Benjamin Disraeli’s words, begin ‘reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror’. The pungency of the Great Stink, as that season was later baptised, literally made MPs flee their committee rooms, and prompted Parliament to fund the construction of the Thames Embankment. Now, so long after this grand deodorising project, it may seem odd that I’m about to encourage you to smell the city. But, apart from costing nothing, an olfactory tour of the city can uncover unexpected dimensions to even its most well-travelled landmarks…
As I strolled along the riverbank near Parliament, I encountered little ineffable and unbearable horror. Each lungful brought only smog from the road, the saccharine scent of e-cigarettes, and a whiff of fish and chips when I walked past St Stephen’s Tavern. But as I wandered to the water, gathering with the tourists snapping photos of the South Bank, there it was—a turbid brackishness, which hits me, unexpectedly, at the end of each inhalation. Like the thick green waves breaking against the embankment, the odour comes and goes, instantly noticeable yet refusing to linger.
An olfactory tour allows for the delightfully futile task of unweaving the origins of these smells
This transitory quality is what makes smell so fascinating. It’s rooted in ephemeral sensations which are hard to trace and harder to describe. But paying attention to this changeability can enliven your experience of smell—just think of what a walk through London’s numerous parks and gardens might yield if you followed the lead of your sniffing conker through cultivated flower beds. It’ll put to shame all the clichés which poets use to rhapsodise floral fragrances. At the Chelsea Physic Garden, you’ll be greeted with an impressionistic whirl of scents—petrichor, the delightful term for rain-moistened soil; a tarry breeze from the road; hints of vegetation both bitter and sweet.
An olfactory tour allows for the delightfully futile task of unweaving the origins of these smells. In the Physic Garden’s grove of poisonous plants, is there a harsh, resinous herbal stench, or are the skull-and-crossbones signs amongst the plants making me imagine things? In the Barbican Conservatory, can I detect a dusty whiff of outside air within its cool, rain-scented greenhouse? In Hyde Park, is it worth trying to separate the aroma of drying cut grass, very much like straw and a little like green tea, from the fresh bouquet of new lawns?
These gardens aren’t all sweetness and delicacy. The subtleties of fresh rose and lavender, so much less cloying than their dried counterparts or perfumes, are combined in the summer heat with the feral green scent of mossy garden soil. It’s a sweetness tinged with complexity and wildness. And, as I lean down towards a flourishing pink rose, a spider scuttles between the petals, inches from my face.
Luckily, there are a good many places in London where you can bask in the pleasures of scent in a decidedly more contained manner, without the threat of arachnoid encounters. In Floris’ store on Jermyn Street, rows of identical glass cloches unveil starkly different fragrances, from elusive jasmine to spicy, citrusy bergamot. And just down the same street is Paxton and Whitfield, London’s oldest cheesemonger, where instead of delicate florals, the air is heady with the earthy savour of ageing cheeses (I recommend trying Stichelton, a buttery blue cheese made with unpasteurized milk). Or head to Chinatown Bakery, where the air is warm and toasty from the fresh buns shuttling constantly out of ovens—or to Borough Market to take a deep, nose-tingling breath near Spice Mountain, whose hermetically-sealed packages can’t fully repress the pungency of the herbs and spices it sells—or go and enjoy the chicken Kyiv at Bob Bob Ricard, which comes in a head-turning garlicky pool of herbed butter. Lean down and breathe in, baby.
To focus on a smell, on a few molecules lingering in the air, is to attend mindfully to a literally microscopic stimulus
Few of these locales will be new to Londoners. But experiencing them through our much-neglected nose is a way for us to step back from a world of noise and pressure and engage with the transitory moment. To focus on a smell, on a few molecules lingering in the air, is to attend mindfully to a literally microscopic stimulus, and escape into the calm this can bring.