“VERBAL RECORD. From a visit made along the two banks of the River Seine, from Port Neuf to Rapée de la Gare, February 14, 1790. BY M. HALLE.” (Translated from the original text)

The first recorded smell walk in the Western world took place Feb 14, 1790 – 7 months after the storming of the Bastille in Paris. Commissioned by Royal Society of Medicine, Jean-Noel Hallé and his assistant, Boncerf, conducted a ‘sanitary survey’ and investigation of noxious smells along the banks of the river Seine in Paris.

This work explores “smell as a sequential narrative”. Human experience of smelling is as a series of sniffs, one after the next. To retell the story of Hallé’s smell walk visually I looked to the work of a C12th Benedictine monk, Matthew Paris, who collected tales of pilgrimage routes and created ‘journey maps’.