Underground-Overground: The Heritage Smell of the Glasgow Subway

The Glasgow subway or ‘clockwork orange’ as it is sometimes known, has been associated with a distinctive scent since it was first opened in 1896. This paper tracks the history of that scent over time and links it with the changing character of the subway infrastructure: its late-nineteenth-century beginnings, electrification in 1935, and re-opening after extensive work in 1980. In the context of the subway system’s modernisation, the paper examines how the smell of the subway was presented in newspaper columns and letters as an important aspect of the city’s heritage that was deserving of preservation. However, these discussions suggest that there were (and are) in fact three separate smells of the Glasgow subway: the infrastructural (the smell of tar); the geological (the earth, bacteria, and moisture); and the chemical (the insidious tentacular pollution of the chemical waste-site known as the Stinky Ocean). The scent of Glasgow’s subway should caution us to recognise that smells with heritage value often gain their longevity from their very changeability and ephemerality. The smell of the subway, despite attempts to preserve it, was in fact different in the 1890s, the 1970s, and the 2020s.