Liquid Psychogeography: A London Drift with Jorum Studio
London is a city you negotiate. It is a sprawling, beautiful mess of Roman silt, Victorian soot, and the cold, unyielding glass of the financial district. To walk its streets is to move through different temporalities.
One moment you are in a Dickensian alleyway, the next you are under the neon hum of a high-rise. Jorum Studio, with its cerebral and often jagged approach to scent, provides the only logical soundtrack for such a journey. These perfumes are not just accessories; they are olfactory anchors for the urban nomad.
09:00 | The Primordial Breath at Kew
We begin at the city’s lungs. Before the Central Line begins its rhythmic screaming, we find ourselves at the edge of the Royal Botanic Gardens. The air here is heavy, thick with the night’s dampness and the scent of earth that has been curated for centuries. But we steer away from the manicured rose beds toward the wilder, wooded fringes.
This is where Askr takes hold. It is a fragrance that feels like a cold, salty gasp. There is no pretty floral opening here; instead, you are hit with a rugged eruption of galbanum and peppered balsamics. It is a vessel carved from ancient, unyielding wood, drifting through a forest that has been submerged in brackish water. As you walk past the great oaks, the scent of ash and seamoss underfoot creates a protective, ink-stained armor. It is ozonic, dark, and profoundly green. It is the smell of a world before the concrete took over.
In the heart of the metropolis, Askr is your first deep breath at full lung capacity.
14:00 | Notting Hill
By early afternoon, the light has changed. The white-washed villas of Notting Hill reflect a hazy, enveloping heat that makes the pavement shimmer. This neighborhood is a masterclass in artifice: charming on the surface, but with a complex, rhythmic heartbeat beneath. To navigate the crowds on Portobello Road without losing one's soul, one needs a ritual.
Enter Boswellia Scotia. This is incense reimagined for the modern sunlight, a golden and gossamer-light veil. It strips away the cold stone of the cathedral and replaces it with the warmth of royal frankincense and the mysterious edge of black hemlock.
As you weave through the antique stalls and the scent of roasted coffee, Boswellia Scotia wraps you in a quietly magnetic aura. It is aromatic, almost balsam-like, a preparation for the city’s chaos through the magic of ancient herbs.
It is a translucent sanctuary, turning a simple walk into a ceremony of protection.
20:00 | Tate Modern
As dusk falls, the South Bank becomes a theatre of shadows. We cross the Millennium Bridge, the wind whipping off the Thames, toward the concrete monolith of the Tate Modern. Inside the Turbine Hall, the scale of human ambition feels both inspiring and terrifying. For a space where reality is constantly being deconstructed, only Fantosmia makes sense.
This is a scent of pure texture, a sculptural masterpiece that feels like an object pulled from a wonder-box wrapped in three layers of industrial fabric. It is black pepper and shiso leaf meeting the cold touch of castoreum and leather. Fantosmia is mercurial and blurred; it smells like a nostalgic past being viewed through a foggy, ethereal lens of the future. It is ink-stained and granular, an immaterial reliquary that doesn't just sit on the skin but occupies the air around you like an installation.
It is the scent of a city that never stops dreaming in obsidian.
Photography by © Sigurd Magnor Killerud
Product kindly provided.