by Peter Burke
Cities, more exactly certain parts of cities, not only look different, but have different characteristic sounds and they even smell different. A historian whose imagination stretches to smells, Simon Schama, has described the characteristic smell of 17th-century Amsterdam as ‘A briny aroma of salt, rotting wood, bilgewater and the tide-rinsed remains of countless gristly little creatures housed within the shells of periwinkles and barnacles’ combined with the smell of new-cut timber and the stench of ‘night-soil boats’. In similar fashion, Patrick Süsskind’s best-selling novel of the 1980s, Perfume, evoked the typical smells of eighteenth-century Paris.
I lived in Singapore in the 1950s, before its cleanup under the regime of Lee Kuan Yew, under whom the traditional tolerance of litter and strong smells was replaced by official intolerance, as in the case of the 19th-century French cities vividly described by Alain Corbin. I thought at the time that I could have found my way around certain streets blindfolded thanks to smell alone, especially the smell of various spices – not to mention durian, a fruit that is good to eat but smells bad and was kept in the open air, in piles on street corners. The kitchens of some restaurants were on the pavement outside and gave their neighbourhoods their pervasive sweet-sour smell. When I revisited these streets 50 years later, the smells seemed to have disappeared, but something like them could still be found in Taipei, triggering Proustian memories.
Visitors notice what local people take for granted, smells included. When I began visiting Brazil, everyone leaving the airport of São Paulo was met with the sweet smell of ethanol, car fuel based on sugarcane. The provincial city of Araraquara smelled of orange juice, since producing it was the city’s main industry. Visitors to Salvador and Recife in the Carnival period were and are likely to smell a cocktail of at least three smells: sweat, beer and piss.
In early modern cities, too, the inhabitants must have been able to find their way by their nose. Waste was often disposed of by throwing it out of the window. Shops opened onto the street, and much commerce took place at stalls in the marketplace, including preparing and selling food, so everyone must have been used to the smell of baking bread, roasting meat and frying fish, not to mention fruit, whether ripe or rotten. The inhabitants probably no longer noticed the smellscape, but visitors did, and their comments are invaluable for historians. When the fifteenth-century Castilian traveller Pedro Tafur visited Cairo, he noted cooks walking the streets ‘carrying braziers, and fire, and dishes of stew for sale’.
More common than Tafur’s neutral tone were the complaints of visitors. Montaigne’s appreciation of Venice and Paris was diminished by their bitter smells of marshes and mud (aigre senteur, l’une de son marets, l’autre de sa boue). Seventeenth-century English visitors to Paris agreed that it stank: John Evelyn wrote that Paris smells ‘as if sulphur were mingled in the mud’. Edinburgh was nicknamed ‘Auld Reekie’ on account of its smells (including the smell of beer), while a visitor complained that ‘I never came to my own lodging in Edinburgh, or went out, but I was constrained to hold my nose, or to use wormwood or some such scented plant’. In similar fashion, it was common for the upper classes to carry a pomander, a ball of perfumes that was believed to protect the holder against infection as well as against unpleasant odours. As for London, even a native, Sir Dudley North, remarked on London’s ‘sooty air’ in the late 17th century. There was some awareness of the need for what we might call ‘smell management’. Smelly trades – tanners, for instance, dyers, fishmongers and tallow chandlers – were often confined to the edge of the city. In 1580, the Lord Mayor of London ordered street cleaning to avoid ‘the loathsome stinks and savours that are in the several streets of this City’. More often, though, the removal of rotting food was left to scavengers such as pigs.
The early modern European city was clearly no sensory utopia, though critics of the industrial city have sometimes viewed it in that way. Manchester in the age of Engels and London in the same period, before the movement for improved public health associated with Edwin Chadwick, probably smelled worse. How will cities smell in the future? Which odours will we recall with nostalgia or relief?
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
nemos (November 19, 2025). The Smellscapes of Cities. NEMoS. Retrieved December 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1568a