“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).

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.