Finally, March is almost here! This month’s challenge:
★★★Go out for a city or town walk, but let your nose lead the way and consciously focus on the different smells you encounter ★★★
☆☆☆ And let us know about your nosey adventures by posting here on our Active10 forum using the hashtag #SmellWalk” in your title ☆☆☆
I am really excited about choosing this month’s walk as it is a bit of an unusual one. I always wanted to choose the topic of City Walks as one of the challenges, having read or rather listened to a book by Shane O’Mara titled In Praise of Walking: The new signs of how we walk and why it’s good for us.
This book has a chapter that fascinated me.
It’s called walking the city. And this focuses on the reasons why some cities are more walkable than others; it explains the walkability index, an index focussing on urban design elements that make a city more attractive for walkers: ”A very walkable city is one where, when you go out of your front door or a hotel lobby, amenities are all within at most a few minutes walk.” When designed right in its urban spaces, it would be more correct to say that “A city walks you” than “You walk a city”.
This fascinated me. Also, because I have, as part of my work, looked into the relationship between walks, culture-led regeneration, and the urban environment. For this work, I devised my own kind of culture index by walking a city; the resulting walks I named #Culture30walks. It counted how many cultural encounters I - as the walker - had whilst walking a 30-minute route from my accommodation to my place of work. And as I was travelling a bit to other cities, I documented these #Culture30walks with pictures on social media. There were cities that were culturally rich, with public sculptures, big and small, mural art on walls of buildings, little theatres, painting in gallery windows, and ceramic art in shop windows. And then there were cities that were culturally poor, with 30min of walking on streets, only seeing cars, chain shops, stark buildings, and no creativity anywhere.
So that’s where my mind wandered to when seeing the title in Annabel Street’s book: (Chapter 11) Take a City Smell Walk.
What I hadn’t expected was the addition of that important sense, one we’re often completely oblivious of on a walk, that of smell. Unless, of course, we come across some rather unpleasant smells.
So this chapter encourages the walker to understand how a city or a town can be experienced as a multitude of different smell experiences, training our noses as we go along. This becomes even more important for individuals who have lost their sense of smell after a Covid-19 infection.
As Street suggests, “scent and odour add to the sheer joy of being alive. Walking nose-to-air, pursuing the odorous notes of an English town, we followed a trail of… damp, leaves, diesel/smell of bus, soil, aftershave, stale clothes, pine tree, wet cardboard, dust, paint, detergent, bleach, smell of hair, salon, fresh coffee, sweet warm baking, diesel (again), gutted, fish and pizza.”
Street goes on to say that the ability to smell is much like a muscle: use it or lose it, basically.
And so I have come to realise that a city or town walk can
- not only be that pleasurable meandering of discovering your urban neighbourhood,
- Nor just the delightful cultural encounters of visual and auditory creative things a town or city has to offer,
- Nor just that purposeful walking to get somewhere,
- But it can also be that full sensual experience, one that includes your nose!
So for this month’s challenge, we take Annabel Street’s challenge on: take your nose out for a walk. Catch a scent or two. Urban walks with a lot of variety will give you a lot of diverse odours; so choose routes that might include open and closed spaces, green and concreted, upmarket and run-down areas, pedestrian zones with bakeries and florists, neighbourhoods with hedgerows or hospitals.
And if you have time in the month to do the walk twice, change the time of day or weather conditions; the subtle changes will also affect what you smell.
★★★So for this month’s challenge, go out for a city or town walk, but let your nose lead the way and consciously focus on the different smells you encounter ★★★
☆☆☆ And let us know about your nosey adventures by posting here on our Active10 forum using the hashtag #SmellWalk” in your title ☆☆☆
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Readings from
Annabel Street (2021): 52 ways to walk.
The surprising signs of walking for wellness and joy, one week at a time. Chapter 12 : Take a City Smell Walk.
Shane O’Mara (2019) Praise of Walking. The new signs of how we walk invite it’s good for us. Chapter 5 : Walking the City.
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For reference, our first challenge from January is here
★ January Challenge - Walk in the Cold
healthunlocked.com/active10...
★ February Challenge - Take a 12-min Walk
Runniversary Walk 👍😊
The benefits of walking 
