Stenches & Stinks: Foul Odors & Smells (IHTM)

When I was first time in college, it was a regional technical college in the next town. I used to get the bus there most mornings, and I recall that around this time of year, it was particularly prone to thick, low lying fog.

This was nice most of the time, as it was a pretty town with a nice tree lined river, except there was also the local tannery.

The combinaiton of its output and a thick blanket of fog made for some very queesy moments as we got off the bus.
 
MercuryCrest said:
It's interesting that when my former roommate moved into the apartment I now live in, she mentioned an "odd, apartment smell". She doesn't do well with air fresheners and the like, but spent years trying to figure out where it came from.

Whelp, I now know that it's the kitchen sink drains. This place has always had terrible drains, but yeah, if you don't run the kitchen faucet for a few days, the smell comes up from the pipes. It's not sewage proper, it's just a nasty funk. I talked to the last plumber to be out here and he flat out said that the pipes were so corroded that *anything* that wound up down there would stick and you can guess the rest of the story.
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I have very shallow drains, to the extent that when I run the washing machine, it can bubble up in the bath plughole (downstairs bathroom). This can lead to some somewhat smelly drains, so now I pour a capful of Zoflora down each plughole whenever I'm not going to be running water for a while - so overnight or when I'm going to be out for a while.

Seems to help.
 
MercuryCrest said:
You'd think so, but no. Roommate and I have tried everything over the years.
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Have you tried enzyme cleaning plughole sticks?
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Who me said:
York used to pong a bit when the sugar beet factory was working long gone now but that used to be everywhere
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Ah, sugar beet. I was born and brought up in Peterborough, so the pungent aroma of the Silver Spoon factory was most familiar. I remember coming back from Uni on the train and getting off at Peterborough to be greeted by the smell - it's as if it knew I was coming home.
 
Something round here is scented like Camay soap. Only smell it at night when i walk the dog, not worked out where it is coming from yet, but very distinctive patch of pleasant fragrance. Pretty sure its a plant, as its always in the same area.
 
Eyespy said:
Something round here is scented like Camay soap. Only smell it at night when i walk the dog, not worked out where it is coming from yet, but very distinctive patch of pleasant fragrance. Pretty sure its a plant, as its always in the same area.
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maybe Daphne? shrub with teensy pink flowers - most often. Or mahonia? Shrub with spiky evergreen leaves and yellow flowers.

If you do find out I may want one ;)
 
Eyespy said:
Something round here is scented like Camay soap. Only smell it at night when i walk the dog, not worked out where it is coming from yet, but very distinctive patch of pleasant fragrance. Pretty sure its a plant, as its always in the same area.
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I had a similar thing happen some time ago and then I worked out that one of my neighbours has a tumble dryer working of an evening with the vent poking out a front window, and they must use some kind of scented detergent.
 
hunck said:
The bovril factory which used to be on Hackney Marsh until the 80s was something else - the pungency spread around the the whole locality & made yer nostrils itch.
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I don’t I remember that Hunck. I spent every weekend on the marshes as a kid in the 80’s. Now I want to know why I don’t remember it lol.

I remember the stench of the vinegar factory (Sarsons..?) on the south side of London bridge though
 
Dick Turpin said:
I don’t I remember that Hunck. I spent every weekend on the marshes as a kid in the 80’s. Now I want to know why I don’t remember it lol.

I remember the stench of the vinegar factory (Sarsons..?) on the south side of London bridge though
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Hmmm…..you’ve got me wondering now - on looking up Bovril, it seems there was a factory at one time but in Old St, not Hackney Marsh.

I used to visit a clothing factory which was very close to the smell producer & distinctly remember the pungent occasional smell. On a still day it hung over the flat land. The story from the clothing people was the smell was caused by ‘cleaning the pipes’ or something, so it wasn’t always present.

But if it wasn’t Bovril, what was it? Or is it a false memory?
 
hunck said:
Hmmm…..you’ve got me wondering now - on looking up Bovril, it seems there was a factory at one time but in Old St, not Hackney Marsh.

I used to visit a clothing factory which was very close to the smell producer & distinctly remember the pungent occasional smell. On a still day it hung over the flat land. The story from the clothing people was the smell was caused by ‘cleaning the pipes’ or something, so it wasn’t always present.

But if it wasn’t Bovril, what was it? Or is it a false memory?
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I don’t remember it being in old street either Huck. I quickly googled it, but all I can find out is that the factory moved to Burton on Trent, but I couldn’t find out when.

I grew up not far from old Street, but I certainly have no memories of a Bovril factory as a kid. Also I was a young postman in 1987, and my “walk” was nearby Clerkenwell, and again I have no memories of a Bovril factory being in the area.
 
Dick Turpin said:
I don’t remember it being in old street either Huck. I quickly googled it, but all I can find out is that the factory moved to Burton on Trent, but I couldn’t find out when.

I grew up not far from old Street, but I certainly have no memories of a Bovril factory as a kid. Also I was a young postman in 1987, and my “walk” was nearby Clerkenwell, and again I have no memories of a Bovril factory being in the area.
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Probably before your time - it opened in 1889, don’t know when it closed.

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https://www.unilever.co.uk/brands/nutrition/bovril/
"(...) By 1968, the Bovril empire owned Argentinean beef ranches that totalled the equivalent to half the size of England. Production was also moved from London to its current home in Burton on Trent."

Hackney Wick used to have quite a number of industrial premises, but a minor event that happened sometime between 1939 and 1945 appeared to have curtailed a lot of operations.
There was, however, a shoe factory in Hackney for years and years, also 'Lesney' (the maker of 'matchbox cars') owned a lot of buildings in Hackney.
Also a long standing company in the area was 'Clarnico' which made sweets until 1972.
Apparently there was also a cough medicine factory and a fertilizer factory.

Admittedly none of those are likely to smell beefy (except maybe the shoe company).
 
hunck said:
Probably before your time - it opened in 1889, don’t know when it closed.

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Another quick Google suggests that it was on the corner of Old Street and Bunhill Row. If that’s the case, then the building may have been demolished at some stage in the 1960’s (if not sooner) as a tower block was built on that site in the mid 1960's called Braithwaite house.

A girl in my class at school lived in it. As did the Kray twins. It was there that they were arrested by "Nipper" Reid and his squad in a dawn raid on the 8th May 1968.

I also did a quick Google Street map of the area today, and even the Tower block has gone. Replaced by a modern glass building.

The area looks so much different from the area I remember.
 
Frideswide said:
maybe Daphne? shrub with teensy pink flowers - most often. Or mahonia? Shrub with spiky evergreen leaves and yellow flowers.

If you do find out I may want one ;)
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Apparently it’s a Daphne- met dogwalker who had a friend who knows a former owner.

noidea which one, other than it’s frarengrent after dark.
 
It's the muck-spreading time of year again. And it's very warm, so I'm sleeping with my bedroom window open. I've got so used to the smell that it doesn't really register now, until one of my farmer friends who lives down the bottom of the hill apologised for the fact it was going to be a smelly week, which caused me to start smelling it again!

I've started hallucinating smells in my sleep. The other night I woke up convinced that the dog had peed in the bedroom, because I could smell an ammoniac sort of smell. When I woke up - nothing. Similarly, I quite often wake thinking 'that bloody dog has pooed on the floor somewhere' (it's not unlikely, she often poos on the bathmat, she pees on it too) only to get up in the morning to find not a trace.
 
Stinks're part of life innit. :nods:

When we're out cycling, if we cop a whiff we'll rush to say 'D'you mind?' first. Thereafter follows the 'Who smelt it dealt it' routine. HIGHLY mature.

A horse-pat elicits 'There's your tea!' and anything on fire is Your Dinner.

The miles just FLY by. :chuckle:
 
RaM said:
If like a good few round here you move to a area and don't like the smells then you move to the wrong place.
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There used to be a truly foully-stinking rendering plant near us. You could slice up the smell with a cake knife.

Our local farmers experimented with ploughing various unprocessed fertilisers into the ground such as, we were told, chicken carcases and I personally reckon, the actual walking Undead.

The air is much cleaner now. We have lots of new houses a mile or so away.
Not a coincidence: the stinky farmers/renderers died off and their heirs sold up to developers.
 
Brought up in the country so muck-spreading etc never bothered me, but my last school was about 100 years from the local brewery and the smell was…interesting when the wind was in that direction. Definitely hops but something else too that made it oddly all-pervasive.
I worked in an office that was part of an old building, something to do with the railways I think that had all been partitioned off into offices with long halls between them and loading bays so the halls were freezing in winter as the doors were never closed in the day. It was about a quarter of a mile from the local dump and the stink sometimes, like well-rotted cabbage and sewage, sweet and powerful and absolutely cloying It seemed to just coat the inside of your nose (which eventually stopped smelling it in self-defence I think).
 
Fanari_Lloyd said:
Brought up in the country so muck-spreading etc never bothered me, but my last school was about 100 years from the local brewery and the smell was…interesting when the wind was in that direction. Definitely hops but something else too that made it oddly all-pervasive.
I worked in an office that was part of an old building, something to do with the railways I think that had all been partitioned off into offices with long halls between them and loading bays so the halls were freezing in winter as the doors were never closed in the day. It was about a quarter of a mile from the local dump and the stink sometimes, like well-rotted cabbage and sewage, sweet and powerful and absolutely cloying It seemed to just coat the inside of your nose (which eventually stopped smelling it in self-defence I think).
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What does a brewery smell like? I'd imagine a sweet, pleasant aroma. Seems I'm wrong. :omg:
 
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