“Nobody ever worked out what caused the subway smell. Some say the sparks, some say the moss in the tunnel.” (Sally Magnusson, The Scotsman, 1980)
Glasgow’s subway system, the Clockwork Orange, has a renowned scent whose qualities act as a smellmark in Glaswegian’s understanding of their city. The smell might derive from geological, infrastructural or chemical sources, and will likely have altered since the subway’s opening in 1896 over the course of three modernisation programmes in 1936, 1977 and 2023 respectively. To find out what smells are currently present, on Thursday March 21, 2024, a group of 6 smellwalkers recorded their smell perceptions of the surrounding streets and station ticket offices (overground) in comparison to the smells of the escalators, platforms, and train carriages (underground).