The smells of ordinary life, from traditional pubs to old books, are part of our culture and heritage – and many of them are in danger of being lost.
Imagine an old leather-bound book just pulled out from a wooden shelf. Its yellowed pages release dust as they open. Even before you begin to read the book, the unique smell of it fills your nose.
This familiar scent is not only a simple pleasure for people who like to peruse libraries and bookshops. These smells have a cultural heritage value, and they are at risk of being lost. For every old book that falls apart, is thrown away or kept locked behind a temperature-controlled curatorial door, these scents become harder to experience. It is a problem that is far from unique to books – from perfumeries and pubs to entire cities, the background scents of our lives are changing all the time.
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For Cecilia Bembibre, a researcher at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, the smell of old books is important. She is developing different techniques to recover "extinct" scents from the past and to preserve those around today for the future.
It's a facet of heritage that is often, quite literally, overlooked. "The proposals made by cultural heritage spaces such as galleries, museums, historic houses, are mostly focused on the sight," says Bembibre. "The engagement they propose tends to be visual. [With] some exceptions, the stimulation of senses, like the objects that can be touched or smelled, is reserved for children."
Bembibre is trying to rectify that neglect of scent. "I wanted to address an issue that has been researched quite little – that has to do with smells as the olfactory heritage of humanity."
But how do you capture something as intangible as a historical scent? One method involves exposing a polymer fibre to the odour, so that the smell-causing chemical compounds in the air can stick to it. Then Bembibre analyses the sample in the laboratory, dissolving the compounds stuck to the fibre, separating them and identifying them. The resulting list of chemicals is effectively a recipe for the scent.
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Heritage scent researcher Cecilia Bembibre is working to create an archive of endangered scents (Credit: H. Mahgoub)
Another method separates and identifies the compounds directly from the gas sample – an approach commonly used in the perfume, food and beverages industry, as it allows volatile odour-active compounds to be identified. A third way is to use the nose itself, either by asking panels of people to describe certain smells, or by asking expert "noses", who may be perfumers or scent designers.
"We characterise the smell from the human point of view," adds Bembibre. "This is important because if we want to preserve it for the future, it depends on many factors. Not only the chemical composition but also our experience."
Bembibre has chemically extracted the smells of old leather gloves, ancient books and mould, among other things. She has reinterpreted the smells of a 1750 potpourri house recipe and of the old books housed in St Paul's cathedral. To do this, she reinterprets them from the smell's chemical compounds until reaching the same scent.
