‘It Smelt Real’: Jorvik Viking Centre and the Experience of Museum Smellscapes

Despite the emergence of sensory history and the increasing use of smell at museums and heritage sites, little attention has been paid to how smell experiences and public perceptions of the past mutually shape each other. Using newspapers, user-generated reviews, participant observation, and surveys, this article provides an analysis of smell’s use and reception at Jorvik Viking Centre, one of the first UK museums to use artificial ambient scents, from its opening in 1984 to the present. Both distributions of the sensible and longer histories of smell media have shaped the way academics, museums professionals, and visitors have responded to Jorvik’s smells. In contrast to existing work that has dismissed the use of smell in museums and heritage spaces as a curatorial trick that contrasts a foul-smelling past with contemporary odorlessness, this article argues that Jorvik’s scents offer an example of a ‘key smell’ that allows for the exploration of multiple overlapping experiences of the past and which draw on an audience equation of realism and authenticity with the strength, emotional intensification, and distillatory quality of reconstructed smellscapes.