Preserving the smells of history
Heritage scientist Cecilia Bembibre wants to add an extra dimension to the study of historic locations and objects: smell.
Cecilia Bembibre, a third year PhD student at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, is travelling around England collecting the ‘scent profiles’ of objects in historic collections. Using carbon sponges that absorb the organic compounds let off by objects, she then runs these samples through a gas chromatographer and a mass spectrometer to produce a kind of chemical blueprint for the object’s smell. She likens this to a recipe.
Chemically, scents can be broken down easily into their compounds. ‘Old book smell’? That’s acetic acid, furfural, benzaldehyde, vanillin and hexanol you’re detecting. However, Bembibre is just as interested in the the cultural reception that different smells have received throughout history: “In order to understand and archive a smell, we need to know about the human experience of it.”
Bembibre’s research is currently focused on two sites: Knole House, a National Trust-owned estate built in the 17th Century and the setting of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; and the library at St Paul’s Cathedral. These sites provide both a rich reservoir of scents and an archive of written materials to serve as historical context.
The perception of scent is, by nature, a bodily activity, and Bembibre has responded to this by leading a series of ‘smell walks’, encouraging participants to more actively engage in the ‘smellscapes’ around them. She believes that research into smells can foster a multi-dimensional interaction with heritage and is keen to collaborate with researchers from disciplines such as anthropology to help us better understand the cultural context of our olfactory environment.
Infographic
Download 'Critical Mass', our Annual Review data breakdown