How does smell characterise a place, or even shape it? In 2014 I was living in Dalston, London in my first home as a student. Historically, the area has been home to London's working class and immigrant communities. Yet as I write this, the area, like much of London, has changed into something its original inhabitants might not have pictured, or even smelt.
As house prices continue to soar year after year, its streets are now filled with expensive coffee shops, restaurants and bars. It is a neighbourhood in constant transition and my friends and I felt like active participants in its current shift.
We spent weekends sat in the back garden smoking cigarettes, waiting for the inevitable telling off from our neighbours. Has the smell of cigarettes long been in Dalston's air?
The smells in cities are a complicated and sometimes controversial issue. Central Park in New York was created due to a myth in the 1850s that disease travelled through smell. Activists successfully rallied to reserve a piece of land in the middle of Manhattan for the creation of the park.
Humans have been interested in scents for ages but think of it as a 'secondary' sense when compared to sight or sound. Dogs, on the other hand, distinguish between stationary and moving objects by their smells. In fact, such is their attachment to smell, research has shown that dogs even dream about smells - much like 30% of the blind human population.
Scent is also a powerful trigger of memories. Whether it is the smell of your mother's lasagna baking in the kitchen, or fresh flowers from the market, scent acts as a time machine, allowing you to delve deep into your memory.
Those living in large metropolises are becoming increasingly desensitised to naturally occurring scent. Walk down any major high street around the world and the smells which you experience are carefully constructed advertising tools, designed to bring more people into the shop to buy products.
LUSH, Subway and Starbucks are all known for manufacturing unique 'shop scents' aimed at subtly manipulating our nostrils towards the latest soap, sandwich and strawberry frappuccino. Fashion retailer Abercrombie opts for a more direct approach - enveloping its dimly-lit shops in an invisible fog of its own perfume.
In 2006, Arcade Marketing, an advertising agency, invited complaints after it infused bus stops in San Francisco with the smell of cookies as passengers stood waiting for their bus home next to huge signs emblazoned with slogans like 'Got Milk?' The campaign was eventually recalled due to nationwide protests but it begs the question: how far can the manipulation of our senses go?
In 2014, The Guardian published an article on the city of London "losing [its] smell." The author, Victoria Henshaw, writes, "our cities are losing their smells, they are seen as something negative, to be banished at all costs, but we've now become deodorised to the extent that people are developing an increasing number of allergies and environmental sensitivities."
An urban scent dictionary and map of London has been created in collaboration with Cambridge University, the University of Torino, Yahoo Labs and the Royal College of Art. This maps out 'Urban Smellscapes' where people can geotag the smells of certain areas, it is then searchable and accessible to the public online. Although this still makes it hard to pin down exactly which smells cities should eliminate, as humans can distinguish between a trillion different odours but city officials only deal with the management of less than ten.
Returning back to Dalston, would it be a different place if it smelt differently? Grace Brown, a longtime resident recalls the smells she experienced while growing up in the area.
"It used to smell really bad. I remember I hated having to go down Ridley Road Market with my mum because the smell of fish and questionable meat used to make me gag. There used to be lots more hair product shops and they would smell really nice when you walked past them. All the food from the restaurants smelled really nice, so much Mediterranean, West African and Caribbean cuisine all over the place. People used to smoke weed in the street way more openly so there was that as well. The worst thing was that in the morning it would smell like piss."
Whilst many of the smells Grace talks about remain, there has been an arrival of many new odours in recent years. The smell of garlic, a direct product of the increase in pizza restaurants, now shares a pavement with the instantly recognisable smell of weed. The rise in coffee shops has also helped the scent of coffee cement its place as a dominant player in the area although the area's many greasy spoon cafes and Turkish social clubs must also take credit. Why have all these new smells arrived then? Grace thinks its gentrification.
"The middle-class communities who have arrived in recent times want places in which they can feel comfortable in and so they open restaurants and coffee shops they like and feel safe in. A larger police presence has certainly contributed to a decline of people smoking weed on the street."
For Grace, these changes mean Dalston is a different area to the one she knew. "Personally I can't remove myself emotionally from the gentrification that has happened to the place I grew up in. I find it devastating that the soul has been ripped out of such a previously vibrant area. The change in the smell of Dalston is really indicative of what has happened to the diversity of the place, and the squeezing out of its working class residents by wealthier people."
Ending on a more positive note, Grace's favourite place in the borough is still there. "Arthur's Cafe - in my opinion is the best builder's cafe in London, and its run by the same old guy who inherited it from his dad. It's one of the last bastions of the working class in Dalston and it continues to smell like chips, tea, sausages, eggs and building dust," she says.
Even though most would agree eliminating the smell of piss and fish around the neighbourhood is a positive thing, our personal scent memories of an area would disagree. Not everyone likes a whiff of urination whenever they leave the house but it becomes controversial when these smells change.
As people on social media gush about the next bottle of 'eau de parfum' replicating scents of cosmopolitan cities, a fish and chip shop is closing due to high rent. Waiting in the wings is another coffeeshop, replete with stonewashed surfaces and chalkboard menus, paintbrush and flat white in hand. How will we navigate back home?