What does Edinburgh smell like?
What smells can be encountered in the city? How does smell link people to place, and to one another? How do smells change over time? On 18 June 2024, Dr Tess Davis and I explored these questions through an exploratory workshop around smell, including smell mapping, as part of the RSE-funded workshop series on ‘The Smell of Scotland’ (Dr Xuelei Huang).
Smells were described as warm, cold, rhythmic, relating to certain times of day, year and to particular seasons, and to deeply personal life events. The smell of gorse in Holyrood Park, the scent of perfume worn to one’s own wedding, the whiff of the 1 o’clock gun fired at Edinburgh Castle. Scents could be related to home, to work, to arrivals and departures, and the afterlives of these. One participant still noticed the smell of the gun every day, although she no longer worked at the castle.
Do people smell the city differently? Participants offered up scents spontaneously – leading us to reflect on how smells are at once intensely individual and deeply connective. People turned to one another at the table to agree that the ‘smell of the rain when it splashes on the pavement’ was an ‘Edinburgh smell’, as was the scent of beer when the wind blows a certain way, burnt wood in the winter, and cinnamon buns with the rise of Swedish bakeries across the city centre. Depending on where one lived in the city, some scents were stronger, frequent, or rarely smelt.
Tess and I divided participants into groups to discuss three categories of smell: smells of baking, smells of nature, and deep-fried smells. We discussed whether these smells were old or new, urban or rural, common or rare, relating to wealth or its absence. Smells had could have multiple meanings according to their temporality – a fresh smell of chips and vinegar on the air during a night out was a good smell, while a lingering smell of scampi in the carpet of a hotel was not such a good one. These smells evidenced the lingering presence of past persons and their practices in the city.
We ended with a mapping activity (Figure 1), where participants mapped smells to a map of the city, identifying a wide range of smells linked to specific areas: ‘sea, sand and wet dog’, ‘cannabis and tobacco (sometimes vapes)’, ‘horses, manure, leather’, ‘lime flowers – honey!’. Many were publicly available smells, others were restricted, intimate and linked to personal memories with specific others. ‘Rubber, netballs, sweaty tops’, for example, was pasted onto an East Edinburgh school. ‘Blood, tears, milk, tea and toast’ to the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh’s hospital and main maternity ward. These smell descriptors provoked a sudden visceral reaction for me, transporting me back to my own memories of the labour ward.
Figure 1: Smell mapping activity
When I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Leith and North Edinburgh in 2018-2019, the smells of the neighbourhoods were changing. During our workshop (above), smell often surfaced as a collective and shared experience. But smell is also about what you can’t have – it is also a lack of participation and of commensality. In my fieldwork, people experienced and identified processes of gentrification through the appearance of new sights and smells in Leith, which could be polarising. What do you think of the new donut shop/bagel shop/bakery was a common question asked by residents to one another or to a visiting ethnographer. Smells of expensive coffee and delicate patisseries were, for some, smells that they and their families could not indulge in.
Imogen Bevan
Dr Imogen Bevan is a social anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Imogen was awarded her PhD in 2022 for the thesis "Bittersweet: Living with sugar and kin in contemporary Scotland", an exploration of everyday sugar consumption in an Edinburgh neighbourhood. Her research explores how sugar consumption links people to place, and demonstrates that sugar is central to processes of family-making and children’s socialisation. She has also published research on the sensory and social dimensions of tobacco smoking and vaping among young people in urban France.
Contact information: imogen.bevan@ed.ac.uk
Tess Davis
Dr Tess Davis is a social psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow. Tess was awarded her PhD in 2023 for the thesis "‘Not my kind of food’: Dietary polarisation on the transition towards sustainable diets", which explored the relationship between dietary identity, food representations and sustainable eating behaviour. Her research shows that meat foods are often described with more rewarding language than plant-based foods in social contexts, which can impact the much needed transition towards sustainable diets. She is currently conducting research on how to encourage sustainable food choices within close social groups, rather than as individuals.
Imogen Bevan and Tess Davis's research is funded by the ESRC postdoctoral fellowship scheme.