Widnes’ industrial heritage had harsh implications for the local population of workers and their families; “dingy streets of hastily constructed houses, with works that were belching forth volumes of the most deleterious gases and clouds of black smoke from chimneys of inadequate height… The air reeked with gas…and small and large heaps of stinking refuse began to accumulate… The homes had no proper sewerage and industrial disease and injury were rampant.” (Kirby, 2020 and Harmonious-Enterpreneurship.org)

The mapping process revealed an olfactory palimpsest whereby notable smells recurred over different time periods in the town, despite their sources being different. The smells were presented for sniffing, and using imagery from the collection’s archive. But what were they? The smells of Widnes are as follows: ammonia, chlorine, food being cooked, Spike Island grass/fresh, coal smoke, vinegar, soap powder, and river bank with sea, salt and mud.

Widnes is a town famous for its smell. This project seeks an olfactory perspective on the history an industrial town in the north-west UK where smell is a part of the rich heritage of chemical manufacturing. The town of Widnes was home to soap factories who, ironically, were responsible for making one place stink in the quest to encourage global populations to be cleaner and more fragrant.

Working with Catalyst Museum, this community-based project seeks to engage a local population to uncover the smells of their parents, grandparents and own lives and generate descriptive olfactory vocabularies for the future.

Using overlaid maps of Widnes at different periods in its history, we elicited smell stories from the past and the descriptive narratives of what smells were dominant at different periods of time.

Recreating and experiencing a multi-sensory virtual reality built environment. Walking around Silchester Insula IX (a Roman town excavated by the University of Reading) dogs bark, flies buzz, people chatter, the blacksmith bangs his hammer as the smells of the cesspit, the animals and the herb garden waft around you.

Virtual reality spaces are becoming more common in everyday life, from gaming to architecture and design, alongside the recent arrival in our shops of a range of VR headsets. However despite this explosion of uses, all these experiences are dominated by one sense – vision. This Roman town VR experience includes smells.

LITERAL : Summer Fruit
The scent from Canterbury’s greengrocers extends into the street as warm summer temperatures help volatilise the aromas of locally grown red fruits. Local farms produce juicy red strawberries whose smell combines with other seasonal crops. Individual scents perceived outdoors combine inside to form a unique “interior greengrocers’ shop” fragrance. The characteristic aroma of a strawberry is the result of about a dozen different aroma compounds. A ripe strawberry’s smell, at 50 milligrams per kilo, lies far above the perceptible odour threshold value in air. The installation includes the classic summer fruit of Kent as a natural, local scent.
Lyrical : history
A city resident exclaimed “Canterbury smells of history!” Globally, place-specific cultural histories have very different aroma associations depending on local foods, customs and rituals. Here, with materials collected in local churches and sites of pilgrim resting places we extracted and created an abstract scent of the city. Tar-coated wood, an old printed text, incense, candles and prayer cushions together form our interpretation of the “history” of Canterbury. The installation includes a complex composite natural, local scent.