Smoke and Smells in Seventeenth-century London

I’ve just started reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Samuel Pepys, and loved her description of smoke and smells in seventeenth-century London:

Clothes, fine or plain, were hard to keep clean in London. Every household burnt coal brought from Newcastle by sea in its fireplaces and cooking ranges. So did the brewers and dyers, the brickmakers up the Tottenham Court Road, the ubiquitous soap and salt boilers. The smoke from their chimneys made the air dark, covering every surface with sooty grime. There were days when a cloud of smoke half a mile high and twenty miles wide could be seen over the city from Epsom Downs. Londoners spat black. Wall hangings, pictures and clothes turned yellow and brown like leaves in autumn, and winter undervests, sewn on for the season against the cold, were the color of mud by the time spring arrived.

Hair was expected to look after itself; John Evelyn made a special note in his diary in August 1653 that he was going to experiment with an “annual hair wash.”

But every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek which everyone breathed.

The photo is of a 17th-century coal grate in the The George, a London pub — obviously renamed!

NB. The coal smoke tells us a lot about how early oak achieved its dark, rich patina. A bit of wax on top of that, and hey presto!