A sense of smell

Recently I reminisced about how Greenwich used to smell when I was a boy. The smell was sooty and oily. It was an industrial smell. It was the smell of centuries of toil and sweat. It was the smell of people living hand to mouth and just getting by. It smelled of a community.
When I came through London the other day, all I could smell was petrol fumes. It was a sterile sort of smell, that had none of the pleasant associations of my memories of Greenwich. It smelled of the tyranny of the motor vehicle, of traffic congestion, of over-population, of me-me-me. It smelled of selfishness.