Retell Lecture

We have all been to a historic library, we’ve all enjoyed the smell of a historic library, but what is it and what does it mean? When we recently, when at UCL Centre for sustainable heritage, we’ve recently been asked to assess the environment at another historic library at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Wren Library – an incredible place. And it has such an intensive smell of old books, and we were also asked for the first time, I was actually quite taken aback by the brief. We were asked, whatever you do please preserve the smell. It is so important to our audience. It is so important how people perceive the library, so that was quite an important message in our research. And indeed, the smell is an important way of how we communicate with the environment. This piece of research was done by an advertising company, because advertisers are so interested in how we interact with each other and the environment. And we see that the majority of people use sight obviously to interact with the environment. But on the second place, we see that smell is also very very important, it is also a very very interesting sense, I will talk a bit about it later. Hearing is obviously very important, and all three of those are represent how we interact with heritage environment. We look at things, we smell things, we hear creaking door and floors. Interestingly, taste is also up there somewhere. Now we don’t get to taste the Mona Lisa very often, but I will just tell you that in a science cafe I was involved in a couple of years ago in Norridge, and when I spoke about acetic paper, it took a second for somebody in the first row to try tasting it to see whether the acids could be tasted as well.