You might want to check to see if it was recently repainted with B&Q's finest Valspar made paint. They had a big problem with a batch this year that lacked a crucial antifungal agent and goes seriously mouldy with odd smells like dead cat and urine.
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Other paint manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank.
We had a smell of gas that took a long time to track down. Even the British Gas bloke said the loss was too small to investigate, but the faint smell in one corner of the room was annoying. I knocked out some plaster where it had been chased into the wall, and at the top, I could see where the pipe bend had been hammered so that it could more easily be plastered over (it would otherwise have stuck proud of the wall). Over the years, the plaster had corroded the weakened (and unprotected) copper, until it eventually started to leak. It was only a tiny leak, but the mercaptan is, of course, very noticeably smelt.
When I was young in and around SW London. you got things like Strong smell of beer, coffee in Putney, many places smelled of gas and one particular place smelled like candles. Smells can be very evocative.
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