London: The Biography полностью

It should not be assumed, however, that the entire citizenry were unwashed. There was soap as early as the fifteenth century, as well as lozenges to sweeten the breath and unguents to perfume the body. The real problem, as with so many others in the city, concerned the presence and the perceived contamination of the poor. In the seventeenth century the smells of poverty intruded into fashionable areas with “stinking Allies” and “suffocating Yards” beside newly designed squares. The smells of London were a great leveller. The rushes laid upon the floors of poorer households harboured “spittle, vomit, scraps of food, and the leakage of dogs and other animals.” In areas such as Bethnal Green and Stepney some of those animals were pigs; in Orchard Street, Marylebone, there were twenty-three houses, which between them contained seven hundred people together with one hundred pigs creating “very nauseous smells.” Once more the difference between smell and no smell is decided in London by money. Money is odourless. In the city of finance, poverty stinks. So in the mid-nineteenth century an urban traveller visited the slums of Agar Town by St. Pancras which not even wind and rain could cleanse and where “The stench of a rainy morning is enough to knock down a bullock.”

In that century, too, other localities had their own especial odours. The area around Tower Street smelled of wine and tea (in the previous century its aroma was of oil and cheese), while Shadwell’s odour was that of the adjacent sugar manufactories. From Bermondsey issued the smells of beer, tanyards, pickle and “the odour of fruits fomenting for jam” while by the river itself Thomas Hardy, lodging in Adelphi Terrace, suffered from illness as a result of the smell of mud at low tide. In nineteenth-century Islington the smell was of horse-dung and fried fish, while the area around Fleet Street and Temple Bar was apparently permeated by the “odour of brown stout.” Visitors recall that the “characteristic aroma” of the City itself was of the stables, with an “anticipatory stench of its cab-stands.” The experience of walking from the Monument to the Thames, however, would unleash a series of identifiable smells from “damaged oranges” to “herrings.”

There were delightful smells as well as disagreeable ones. In the seventeenth century, at midnight, when the bakers of London began to heat their ovens, and when the kitchens and stoves using sea coal were finally at rest, then “the air begins to clear and the smoke of the bakeries, which are heated with wood rather than with coal, spreads a very country-like smell in the neighbouring air.” There were also London streets which had a reputation for being sweet-smelling; such a place in the sixteenth century was Bucklersbury in “simple” or herb time, and newly built Pall Mall. A Japanese visitor of 1897 said that the city smelled of food, while at the same time commenting unfavourably on the breath of London servants. The French poet Mallarmé suggested that the city had the odour of roast beef as well as the scent of fog with “a special smell you only find here.” At a slightly later date, J.B. Priestley recalled the odour of “greasy little eating houses” as well as that of “a smoky autumn morning … with a railway station smell about it.” The smell of transport, in all its forms, has always been characteristic of the city. In the spring the omnibus, for example, had the odour of onions and, in winter, of “paraffin or eucalyptus”; in the summer it was simply “indescribable.” Fog caught the throat “like a whiff of chlorine.” Rose Macaulay remembered a passage off High Street, Kensington, which “smelled of vaseline.” Long Acre smelled of onions, and Southampton Row of antiseptic. Twentieth-century London has been filled with odours, from the smell of chocolate along the Hammersmith Road to the smell of the chemical works down Chrisp Street in the East End and along the locally named “Stinkhouse Bridge.”

Old smells have lingered, like the odour of the river and of pubs, while whole areas have retained their own especial and identifiable atmosphere. An account of the East End written in the late 1960s notes “an almost overpowering smell of fish” and “boiled cabbage,” together with “a musty smell of old wood and crumbling bricks and stagnant air”; almost a century earlier in 1883 the area was similarly described, in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, as imbued with “the fragrance of stale fish or vegetables,” and the nineteenth-century odour “of drying matchboxes.”