Remembrance of Scents Past
But Marks argues that smell is one of the most potent ways to give museum visitors a visceral sense of the past, and to help them remember what they read or saw in an exhibit. Among the scents she designed for the docks exhibition was one inspired by a woman’s memory, in the oral histories, of her dockworker father’s damp woollen coat drying on an electric fire in the nineteen-sixties. Marks thought that the coat might have smelled like her own grandfather’s wool flat cap. He’d been a London cab