Gloucesterstinks.
Tell me I'm wrong.
A project about the one sense nobody thought to keep records of — and what a city loses when its air changes and no one writes it down.
Tell me I'm wrong.
A project about the one sense nobody thought to keep records of — and what a city loses when its air changes and no one writes it down.
The idea
Gloucester has been written down for a thousand years. Its buildings are listed, its charters are archived, its cathedral is photographed several thousand times a day. What has never been recorded is what any of it smelled like — the tanneries, the matchworks, the river at low tide, a Sunday kitchen in a terraced house on Barton Street.
That matters more than it sounds, because smell doesn't work like the other senses. A photograph shows you a person. A smell puts you back in the room with them. Every other way we remember gives us a portrait; this one gives us presence.
So the work is simple, if not easy: find out what this city smelled like, get it down while there's anyone left who remembers, and give people something better than a plaque.
Five stations of Gloucester's air
The Severn arriving twice a day, uninvited, with the sea's opinion of the place.
Silt · cold stone · deep water opened to the airWhere the city was fed, in the open, by people you could see doing it.
Blood · sawdust · straw · ironHare Lane. The trade that made the city rich and made it unliveable downwind.
Lime · hide · something you'd rather not nameMoreland's. England's Glory. Thousands of Gloucester women, and a smell they carried home.
Phosphorus · pine · hot glueThe one that isn't civic history. The one that's yours, and only yours, and gone.
Coal · fat · Sunday · someone calling you inFive of these are the city's. The sixth is missing, and it's the only one I can't research my way to.
Add it belowComing up
September 2026 · Gloucester Guildhall
Fifteen minutes on smell as historical evidence, built around the five stations above. There will be things to smell.
The other half
Alongside the research there's a set of stories — Gloucester pubs, the river, a detective who hears what a city is actually saying underneath what it says out loud. They're published as they're written, in The Songweavers Archives.
The pubs, the docks, the history and the blues are real. The rest is mostly real too, if you know where to listen.
Who's doing this
Writer in Gloucester. Massively interested in what a place is saying underneath what it says out loud.
Previously, careers covering everything from sat in a cockpit, reading a poor signal at speed, with no second attempt and somebody shooting at you, to the same problem in an office with better coffee. None of it needs explaining here. All of it, it turns out, was relevant.
More about the work. And if you run a venue, a heritage project, or anything to do with the docks bicentenary in 2027 — get in touch.