Nobody warns you. That’s the real conspiracy here. You can read a thousand meticulously researched historical novels, watch every costume drama the BBC has ever produced, wander through a dozen museums with their soft lighting and their tasteful little placards—and not one of them will prepare you for the actual, visceral, nostril-first truth of the past, which is that it smelled absolutely rank.
We’ve been catfished, is what’s happened. Centuries of romantic painting, gauzy cinematography, and lavender-scented candles sold in the museum gift shop have conspired to give us the impression that history smelled like… nothing, mostly. Maybe some woodsmoke. Perhaps a hint of rose water, wafting gently from a lady’s handkerchief. Lies. All of it, lies.
Let’s start with the streets, since you’d have to walk down one. Before proper sewage systems—which is to say, for the overwhelming majority of human history—the street was where things went. All things. Human things, horse things, the contents of chamber pots hurled from upper windows with a shouted warning that gave you approximately zero seconds to get out of the way. Historical London had rivers that were less “waterway” and more “linear public health emergency”. The Thames in the 1850s was so thick with sewage that Parliament—Parliament, housed directly on its banks—had to soak curtains in chloride of lime just so the MPs could function without gagging. They called it the Great Stink. Not a metaphor. A literal, documented, government-disrupting event caused entirely by smell.
Now let’s talk about the people, because they weren’t faring much better. Your Victorian gentleman in his crisp collar? Bathed, if he was lucky, once a week, and that’s the aspirational version. Perfume wasn’t a luxury accessory in a lot of eras—it was industrial-grade smell-masking technology, deployed the way you’d deploy a fire extinguisher. Powdered wigs existed partly to disguise the fact that nobody was washing their actual hair, because washing your hair too often was believed to make you ill. The past was not a slow descent into unwashed grubbiness—for enormous stretches of it, staying somewhat dirty was the medical advice.
And that’s before we get to the industries. Tanneries, which processed leather using a genuinely appalling combination of animal fat, dung, and stale urine, and which were legally required in a lot of towns to be situated downwind for reasons that should be extremely obvious. Fishmarkets with no refrigeration. Slaughterhouses in the middle of residential streets. Candle-making with tallow, which is rendered animal fat, and which smelled exactly as appetising as that sounds, at scale, all day. Coal smoke sitting over every industrial city like a lid, so thick that Victorian Londoners developed a whole vocabulary for the different colours and consistencies of their fog, the way Inuit peoples are (probably apocryphally) said to have many words for snow. A “London particular” wasn’t weather. It was breathable industrial exhaust with a jaunty nickname.
This is the bit the museums leave out, and I understand why—you can’t exactly bottle “eau de rendered fat and horse manure” and pump it through the ventilation system next to the Tudor tapestries; visitor numbers would plummet overnight. But it does mean we’ve all internalised this soft-focus, faintly-scented version of history that is, frankly, a lie of omission on a civilisational scale.
Here’s what gets me, as someone who now spends her life trying to drag readers honestly into the past: smell is the sense most directly wired to memory, and we have almost none of it, historically. We inherited the paintings, the letters, the furniture, the architecture—and we lost, almost completely, the actual sensory experience of walking through these places. So we default to imagining silence and soft light, when the truth is your medieval peasant, your Georgian dandy, your Victorian mill worker were all, at every moment, marinating in a smell you would not survive without visibly retching.
So next time you catch yourself wistfully imagining a candlelit evening in some bygone century, do me a favour: add in the tallow smoke, the unwashed wool, the open drain two streets over, and the faint ambient waft of horse. That’s the actual room. That’s the actual air.
The past didn’t smell like nostalgia. It smelled like a public health violation with really good architecture.
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Down the Rabbit Hole
Books and Links
Robert Angus Smith, Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology (1872)
William Tullett, Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2023)
“Hidden Environmental Histories: Exploring the Legacies of Scotland’s Industrial Past.” ↗ — University of Glasgow
“The Great Stink” ↗ — Historic England
“The Great Stink of 1858” ↗ — London Museum