Victoria Henshaw obituary

Urban planner and academic who believed good design considered the smells of towns and cities as well as their sights and sounds

The urban planner and academic Victoria Henshaw, who has died from cancer aged 43, devoted her life to an aspect of cities that is entirely invisible, but which she was convinced had a huge influence over how we perceive places – namely, their smell.

A town centre manager turned urban academic, she became fascinated by this element of the environment that she thought had been crucially overlooked by architects and planners alike. Her doctoral research involved undertaking “smellwalks” with a range of built environment professionals, including urban designers and planners, architects and engineers, in order to open their noses to the aromas of the city and promote a more proactive approach to odour in city design and management.

“It all went wrong when humans stood upright,” she said in a recent interview with Wired magazine. “That’s when we lost our smell-ability. Since classical times, smell has been thought of as one of the lesser senses, compared to the ‘noble senses’ of sight and hearing, and it’s compounded by the fact that smell is something we haven’t been able to record or analyse until very recently.”

Her book Urban Smellscapes (2013) argued that scent has been critically ignored in how we plan places, leading to clone towns of clone smells and a knee-jerk tendency to flush strong aromas from our streets. With industries banished to the edges of towns, the once familiar metropolitan whiffs of hops and spices, coal and yeast, have all but evaporated, Henshaw argued, replaced instead by a desire to make places sterile and neutral, or else swamp them with artificial perfumes.

“Typically, design professionals in the west think about the smell environment in terms of control and management – separation, deodorisation, masking and scenting – but not about preserving and celebrating smells that people like,” she said. Henshaw thought urban planners could do well to learn from Japan, where One Hundred Sites of Good Fragrance have been declared as protected places across the country, from the sea mist of Kushiro to the distinct smell of glue in the streets outside the doll-makers’ homes in Koriyama.

Born in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, daughter of Victor Colley, a chartered surveyor, and his wife, Pauline, an NHS administrator, Victoria went to Wickersley school in Rotherham and studied consumer services management at Leeds Metropolitan University. She graduated in 1994, before working for over 13 years in town management and urban regeneration.

She worked as a town centre manager and economic development manager at Doncaster metropolitan borough council from 2000-05, before moving to North East Lincolnshire council, where she led the £12m renaissance programme. She established her own regeneration consultancy in Rotherham in 2007. Actively engaged in the design world, she was a founding member and chair of the South Yorkshire Design and Architecture Centre and sat on Doncaster council’s design review panel.

She pursued part-time postgraduate studies in urban design and regeneration while working in the field, during which time she was struck by the separation of the academic and professional worlds, leading her research work to have a strong practical focus.

Her PhD, at the University of Salford, focused on the role of smell in urban design, engaging with issues of perception and emotion, and how these influence and shape our behaviours, attitudes and health. Henshaw conducted smellwalks in cities around the world, from Barcelona to Montreal, Edinburgh and Seattle, and established an online Global Smell Map, to be populated with crowd-sourced data, to record what aromas people can detect on their streets.

Having worked as a research associate at the University of Manchester from 2011-13, she joined the University of Sheffield in 2013 as a lecturer in urban design and planning.

She is survived by her husband, Tony Henshaw, whom she married in 1992, and three sons, Brodie, Alastair and Oliver.

Victoria Henshaw, urban planner, born 28 April 1971; died 13 October 2014

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