The Big Nose Guide to London

It takes only a quick visit to almost any other city, almost anywhere, to come to the conclusion that London, objectively and subjectively, stinks.

It does not smell in the way that the countryside does. Where a lifetime in Shropshire is culpable to cause immunity to the odours of fresh manure and wild garlic, by contrast each passing day, month and year spent in the capital is liable to make you acutely more aware of its smells, and the variety of its stench. The smell of the countries heart is not, as the guide-books have a tendency to so dismissively put it, the scents that arise from the eclectic cultural cuisines that appear on the cities vast menu of intoxicating and wallet-emptying restaurants, cafes and corner shops. The tour companies have all, I am sorry to say, been lying through their teeth at you about that. Here, then, is the definitive guide on how to tour this city. The Big Nose Guide to London, if you will.

To address what to some may be an elephant in the room, yes; the nose is, in fact, the definitive tool to understand and navigate any place with which you are not familiar. If you have not yet come to understand that sights can be and most likely are deceiving, then I am afraid there is little I can do to help you with that. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose. Equally, I am in no rush to advise anyone to work their way around London through means of touching everything they can; this is surely a recipe for disaster, even in the cleaner Boroughs. Navigating by sound is an endlessly difficult affair, particularly in a city of cars, bikes, crossing signals and others’ leaky headphones. And with electric cars and tech billionaires dedicated to unplugging human language, cities will fall silent long before they are deserted. No; without a doubt, smell asserts itself the superior by a considerable margin.

With your nose as your guide, London becomes considerably easier to navigate. Its borders become clearer. Are you an upper-middle class millennial craving leather backpacks and loafers that cost more than the days wages of the person selling them to you? Or perhaps a slightly older individual in town with your overcoat and silk scarf, dying to take in the culture? Simply close your eyes and walk until you are overcome by a frankly migraine-inducing square-mile cloud of Jo Malone perfume and you will find you’ve reached Covent Garden. Most likely it is around 5:30-ish. If you double as a hipster, you can from there head south until you start to feel light-headed and giddy from the smell of paint fumes, and you’ve most likely found your spiritual home in the Leake Street Arches. The beauty of your nose (I’m not flirting with you I swear) is that it finds it incredibly difficult to lie to you. And unlike your eyes, worn down by modernist architecture, and your ears — so often confused are they by monotonous top hits and nonsensical politicians — your nose does not hold the ability to convince you that you like something you actually despise.

The phrase London is a forest is one that has been coined time and again by countless organisations and individuals. It has been applied by those promoting environmentalism and by advocates of multiculturalism, as well as numerous others. Part of its longevity as an idea is of course down to the fact that it happens to be true. How I apply it here is that London is best thought of not as a human construction but as a natural formation, shaped and built by the way that we treat others and the world around us. And so, as you would when taking a stroll through the woods, I invite you to consider the city in all its complexity. After all, the moss that so many step on, or over, offers more to the scent of a forest than the towering oaks. And it is worth remembering that though the ground has spots where an animal has left its mark in urine or faeces, it is in the tree tops, from where the most beautiful songs are heard, that you find the branches covered in bird shit.