William Tullett: pongs of the past - a podcast by RNZ

The smell of freshly roasted coffee is now seen by many as an enticing aroma, but that wasn't the case in early 18th century London. It was described as smelling of "fresh urine" and old boots and the new smell was not welcomed in the English capital's streets. Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University Dr William Tullett is fascinated by how people have interpreted smell in other eras, and what that can tell us about how people lived. His first book Smell in the Eighteenth Century: A Social Science was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press and canvassed just how much the smell of England changed over 100 years or so. He's now involved with a team in a group project called Odeuropa which is trying to find out how the past smelled. The programme is using artificial intelligence to analyse hundreds of thousands images and documents to create formulas to recreate roughly 120 smells from the past, for modern noses.

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