LONDON SMELLS

Evening Star, Issue 19522, 1 April 1927, Page 3

LONDON SMELLS

AN OLFACTORY RAMBLE MODERN CHANGES. In days of boyhood in the nineties it used to be a joy to snuff through London, picking out the thousand smells of a great city, some describablo, many elusive, others indistinguishable through remoteness or vagueness, or through the progressive cancellation of opposites in some great general blend (says a correspondent in the London • Times ’). For instance, in Broad street ono began with the great complex smell jf the railway termini at one end, suggestive of oil, smoke, soot, grease, clothes—yes! emphatically tho conglomerate smell of many people’s clothes—of straw in many packings, of leather bags, in trunks, and wooden cases containing Heaven only knows what assortment of goods and treasure; tho smell of paper and of bad ink from tho placards hold by eager boys with their supplies of the latest news; the welcome freshness that came from tho hawkers’ barrows of fruit which sweetened the air as one seemed to breathe apple—and with_ it, orchard—all through the body in one hurried sniff. Probably -the random purchaser of tho fruit thought that his quick eye had detected the color and quality; but even in those days, before psychological study and, above _ all, life had revealed to him something of tho power of scent, ho thought that the olfactory sense had unobtrusively but nevertheless effectively dictated the act. All this, however, was only the preamble to Broad street proper. Once in the Pass itself—for Broad street always suggests a Pass partly blocked at each end—one was greeted by a succeeding group of impressions of

VARYING INTENSITY. Thore was smoked salmon and sawdust, beer with a suspicion of spirit and crude wine, or rather of wood soaked in wine, the compounded hot scent of tea, coffee and cocoa, the hundred smells of baked and especially rebaked meats, the pungency of hot green vegetables, of onions and fish, of oils and fats for cookery (much less perceptible in Broad street than in Cheapside) ; the penetrating impression of tan and of polished leather; the heavilyladen sensations compounded of synthetic perfumes, soaps, burnt sealingwax, and acrid chemicals as one passed the chemists’ shops. The dull background smell of stone and brick, and the sharp, arresting impiession of had paper and rags added each its quota. Above all there was the fine expansive smell of tho horses harnessed to the lorries, vans, and omnibuses that made one unending procession by day up and down tho Pass from Liverpool street to the Bank. Broad street nearly always brought to mind tho fragrance of horses and the pleasant health smells of stables. Together with this prevailing impression came another, welcome and wholesome, that of tar and asphalt. It was clean and unequivocal, without any nonsense or eliisiveness. Along the Exchange were other scents of violets and mimosas, of jonquils, daffodils and roses, all the glory in fact of English glade and garden in spring and summer.

There was also tho VAGUE GENERAL SMELL which haunts the city. There is a special tang in the city air which seems charged with sulphur and carbon and their many oxygenations from tho innumerable fires and furnaces. There is, too, a certain dullness and passivity about it, an absence of any special fragrance or freshness, unless the rains have recently fallen in cleansing volume. But that is another story—as also tho refreshment for every sens'd that used to bo gained in Old Broad street by night from the warm scent of roasted chestnuts and the crisp mellowness of baked potatoes. Elsewhere each part of London had its own characteristics. There was tho rich smell of Convent Garden, of damp earth— the finest and most satisfactory of all clean odors—and green, of cabbage stalks and turnips, of flowers and fruit and trees, of one vast garden, in fact, with all its rival scents of border, and lawn, trees and ferns, flowers and shrubberies, kitchen garden, orchard, dump and neap, in one direct and combined effect. There was, too, the splendor of the Embankment, the SMELL OF THE TREES, and of the wonderful tilings from the river, roused to greater perceptibility by the chunking of tho old paddlesteamers, the tugs and barges, and endless river craft. Along the Embankment was the smell of wet bread, of river slime and ooze, of waters that seemed near the sea, and of the gulls which, in spite of all their deftness and daintiness,_ live coarsely. There was also, at times, the heavy, safe smell of tarpaulins, of waterproof things, and of wood soaked in brine and fresh water. ' Now, after years, London has changed. There is everywhere a deafening roar and thud of machinery, the deathly roar of motor cars and lorries with their hooters and electric sirens, the coarse, metallic clank of_ their engi»ss, tho screeching of their brakes, the rattle of body and wheels, the inhuman persistent thud of their ■pistons.

The eye loses its sharpness of vision for color and brightness, the ear is filled but not fulfilled, and the sense of smell loses all its fineness of discrimination. In London from end to end little else is to be gathered but the stench of burnt oil, and of paraffin and petrol—all the villainy that comes from the exhaust pipes of the endless lorries and cars which have turned London, no mean city, into one vast, throbbing garage of evil sound ami. execrable smell.