Cities, some more than others, have their own distinct odour. Veronica Stivala explores the pongs and shares some tips on how to enjoy ‘smell travel’.

Anyone who has ever visited Edinburgh will recall the distinct smell of hops as you enter from Haymarket in the west of the city.

In 1835, August Lewald, a German travel writer, created a typology of characteristic smells of individual cities.

This list, which ranges from Bremen and fish, to Messina and lemons, ends on a predicatable note with “Munich smells like hops”, because of the city’s longstanding brewing tradition.

Rome is associated with the scent of coffee for Veronica.

Different cities have different smells. In my case, I associate the smell of fresh flowers and fried food with Barcelona, which I remember getting a whiff of as I walked down Las Ramblas; hops again for Munich, a grassy smell is Tuscany, coffee Rome, baked sweets Paris, specifically caramel-glazed eclairs for Lyon, rain and metal is London, seafood and rain again for Brussels, oranges and powder for Bologna…

The list goes on and gets weirder still, but to avoid sounding a bit too much like Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, I shall stop there. Of course, as is evident from this list, people associate particular smells depending on their experiences, where they have visited and their tastes.

We tend to remember the smells we really like, or hate.

A word of confession here, for nostalgia may have got the better of me as I looked back to remember the smells of cities I visited, romantically blocking out the various pungent smells of pollution that are quite intense.

But had I listed dust, garbage, vomit, fuel, toilets, rotting eggs, beans, mouldy cheese, cabbage soup and vinegar, I might have put you off your breakfast, and this article. Sorry.

Barcelona smells of flowers and fried food to this author.

Yet the stinky smells are actually not as bad as some may think, precisely because they are original, and not ‘clone’ smells.

We’ve now become deodorised to the extent that people are developing an increasing number of allergies

Victoria Henshaw, a town planner-turned-odour advocate at the University of Sheffield, has made it her mission to champion the importance of aroma in urban spaces.

She embraces pongs along with perfumes, saying: “Smells 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.

“It’s much healthier to be exposed to strong smells.”

After claiming that “cities are losing their smell”, Henshaw is on a quest to make people reopen their nostrils to the smells of the city and has taken people on ‘smell walks’, guiding them around pungent and sweet-smelling parts of London.

Interestingly, Japan, she says, has one of the most advanced attitudes towards the olfactory sense and its relationship to place, going as far as declaring “One Hundred Sites of Good Fragrance” across the country. If you are keen and brave enough to better smell your city, the task on the right contains some olfactory techniques, as suggested by Henshaw, to help you appreciate more the smells around you.

Snot that way

■ Avoid smell walking if you have a cold or are sick – especially if you have a hangover. Smell performance can be significantly dulled by illness, while if we’re feeling particularly nauseous, then the smell of cigarette smoke, a festering drain or local dustbin lorry probably isn’t going to do any favours. Also, stay hydrated: your nose requires a healthy level of fluids in order to dissolve the odours for your smell receptors to ‘read’ them in the first place.

Keep it varied

■ The greater the variety of settings, the bigger the range of odours we detect and the more we can learn. Think open spaces and enclosed areas, green spaces and hard concrete landscapes, quiet areas and busy roads, busy high streets and run-down alleys behind buildings, retail, markets and other food outlets.

Use all your senses

■ Use your other senses to seek out smell sources. If you see a plant, approach it and as long as it isn’t someone’s prize-winning rose bush, rub the leaves and explore what scent they release. Stick your head inside shops for a sniff – pharmacies, stationers and clothing shops can all be interesting. Also, ask yourself if you can hear any ventilation systems whirring in the background.

Focus

■ While our bodies work hard to detect smells, we don’t register the majority of those we sniff. For that reason, smell walking works best if we try to focus on what we can smell. If you enter an environment but the smell quickly starts to fade, this might be your smell receptors tiring – we call this ‘adaptation’. To counteract adaptation, sniff the skin in the crook of your arm for a moment.

Don’t be embarrassed

■ You’ll get a great deal more out of the experience if you stop worrying what others think of you. Sniff the good, sniff the bad, sniff the boring and sniff the downright balmy.