The sweet success of smell
Apologies for my indulging in childhood nostalgia again, but after considering the contribution of food to local distinctiveness in UD105, my thoughts are straying towards the related matter of smell. The characteristic smell that a neighbourhood may possess, usually deriving from a particular work-related component of the place – the fishdocks, the chocolate factory, the brewery, or whatever – is a key element that makes that place distinguishable from others. Many towns and districts are characterised by a brewery smell, that distinctively sour mixture of hops and malted barley. Maybe a blindfolded CAMRA expert could decide whether he – it would be he – was standing in Edinburgh, Burton or Masham, smelling McEwans, Bass or Black Sheep – I couldn’t.
But one of the strongest and strangest place-smell memories from my childhood is of the unique hybrid of smells that was Aston Cross in Birmingham. I used to take the 64 bus to and from school, passing through what was then a densely populated inner city district. On adjacent corners of the nodal space of Aston Cross stood Ansells brewery and the HP Sauce factory. Pace my imaginary CAMRA member, all breweries smell pretty similar, but a blindfolded triallist smelling that astringent combination of vinegar, fruit, malt and hops would have known he could be in only one place on the earth’s surface. Its distinctiveness has now disappeared, a casualty of deindustrialisation and redevelopment. Ansells went long ago, transferred to Allied Breweries, and production of HP Sauce sadly migrated to the Netherlands last year. Unlike conventional Lynchian landmarks and edges, the geography of local smell changes with wind direction and strength. With your head in a school book, you would always know when you were approaching Aston Cross as the smell infiltrated your nostrils, but sometimes you would be taken by surprise by how far, and in which direction, the olfactory boundary had shifted.
These smell characteristics of places, though powerful, are of course accidental and unintended by-products. I wonder whether the place-branding consultants (yes, they do exist – I met one at the Academy for Urbanism recently) might steal a trick from Asda and others, who deviously pipe smells of bread and coffee through ducts to induce the desire of consumption in their customers. An ecotown that smells permanently of mown grass and honeysuckle? – I hope not, but I wouldn’t be too sure.
The values of local distinctiveness can of course cause ambivalence; not every local peculiarity is seen as positive by all. I am sure that some people, particularly those living nearby, hated the Aston Cross smell. Another (non-smelly) example which I sometimes muse upon is the floor numbering system in Birmingham’s Millennium Point building, designed by Grimshaw Architects. This large unattractive building has five floors, three of which, because of the sloping site, connect with the ground. Someone, and I wish I knew who, numbered these floors, reading from the bottom to the top; G2, G1, G0, L1 and L2. For years, whenever I travelled in the lifts, I would listen to visitors trying to make some logical sense of this code, and to work out whether they needed to go up or down, and how far. The system was locally distinctive, certainly, but also very irritating. I used to comment frequently to friends and colleagues on the stupidity of it. This year the management of the building has clearly lost patience with it, and has renumbered the floors 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4, just like any other five-storey building. Do you know what? I perversely miss those old numbers. The world now has one peculiar thing fewer than before.
Joe Holyoak
Endpiece, Urban Design, Autumn 2008, Issue 108