Surprising no one who's ever had to take the Tube during rush hour in summer, a new data analysis has ranked London near the bottom of the world's nicest-smelling cities.
London ranked 25th out of the thirty cities analysed by a vape company in order to determine the nicest-smelling cities on the planet. The company cross-referenced the size of the individual cities with their Environment Performance Index score (a scientific index that measures 40 performance indicators across 11 categories to determine a country's cleanliness) and the number of bakeries, perfume shops, and flower shops per 10 square kilometres. London got an overall smell score of 5.09 out of 10, beating out only Zagreb, Oslo, and Rome among the analysed European capitals, as well as, somewhat surprisingly, Auckland and Sydney.
As fiercely proud Londoners, we'd turn our noses up at this “research”, but that might lead to us catching a whiff of whatever's been stewing in that dumpster over there for the past week, so lets just say London's size appears to have gone against it here. All of the cities measuring over 1,000 square kilometres ranked at the tail end of the list, which makes sense, as there's only so many perfume shops a city can have.
Now, as for where to go to smell the roses, the top-ranked, nicest-smelling city in the world is … Athens, Greece! Thanks to an impressive 31 bakeries, 31 flowers shops, and 22 perfume shops per 10 square kilometres, the no-reek-Gs racked up a smell score of 8.3. They're followed closely by the city that's probably most associated with nice smells, Paris, with a score of 8.15. Zurich (8.1), Dublin (7.9), and Luxembourg round off the top five. Of course, if none of those seem like attainable destinations just to give your nose a break, you might consider hitting up one of London's great bakeries or ordering a nice bouquet instead. Smell you later!