Today the group visited the Lincolnshire archives, and among other interesting facts I discovered that the Grandstand could have potentially been used as a mortuary in World War Two- which sparked off a lot of ideas for our performance piece.

As we were shown around the archives and given information about the Grandstand’s history as an RAF training site, a thriving racecourse and its’ Expo in 1969, the thing that interested me the most was the contrast between all these roles- particularly that before being used as place where people placed bets and jockeys got weighed, dead bodies may have been laid in these rooms, and families may have come to say a final goodbye to their loved ones.

The idea of tainting a space became something I held onto throughout the visit, and I began to form links to the modern day too, and the Grandstand as it is now. The space has become a Community Centre over recent years, where children come to be looked after; yet, just 70 years ago that very same spot where a child may play with a toy, could have been the place where someone’s dead body was left until a family came.

We will never know if the site was used as a mortuary, but we can analyse how the space would have been viewed by people in the past, and now, if we knew for sure that it had. For me, before I knew it potentially could have been a mortuary, I looked at the Grandstand with a lot of nostalgia at its racecourse days, imagining men and women betting on horses and their reactions when theirs didn’t win. Now the image itself is tainted and so is the space.