This talk – offered in person and online – is one of the series marking Railway 200, via the Institute of Historical Research’s Transport & Mobility History Seminar. It is free to attend, and aimed at anyone with an interest in railway history.
The Glasgow subway or ‘clockwork orange’ as it is sometimes known, has been associated with a distinctive scent since it was first opened in 1896. This talk tracks the history of that scent over time and links it with the changing character of the subway infrastructure: its late-nineteenth-century beginnings, electrification in 1935, and re-opening after extensive work in 1980. In the context of the subway system’s modernisation, the talk examines how the smell of the subway was presented in newspaper columns and letters as an important aspect of the city’s heritage that was deserving of preservation. However, these discussions suggest that there were (and are) in fact three separate smells of the Glasgow subway: the infrastructural (the smell of tar); the geological (the earth, bacteria, and moisture); and the chemical (the insidious tentacular pollution of the chemical waste-site known as the Stinky Ocean). The scent of Glasgow’s subway should caution us to recognise that smells with heritage value often gain their longevity from their very changeability and ephemerality. The smell of the subway, despite attempts to preserve it, was in fact different in the 1890s, the 1970s, and the 2020s.
The talk will be given by Dr Will Tullett, of the University of York.