Last Friday we had, as a group, our first opportunity to visit and explore the Grandstand. Exploring this new site for the first time without objectives could have been a difficult experience, attempting to make sense of the space without any framework within which to do so. Michael’s suggestion, to consider the spaces we explored and to author a series of almost free-written accounts, documenting our initial reactions to some of the smaller spaces within the main Grandstand building, was a useful way of entering into dialogue between oneself and the site.

Miwon Kwon has identified how conceptual perception of site has changed “from a physical location […] to a discursive vector” (Kwon, 2004, pp. 29-30), and it is this idea of the exploration of site as a discursive process which I discovered on my first visit. As a way of exploring and reacting to the site, I engaged in the creation of small texts, through which I “told as a distribution of stories and dramatic episodes” (Lorimer, 2006, p. 515) my engagement with the Grandstand as a site. Through a process of responsive creation, I became capable of holding in stasis the process of feed-and-feedback which existed in those fleeting moments between site (its structure, history, context) and self. The space gave information which I interpreted through sense – sight, sound, smell, touch; what Fiona Wilkie calls “site as story-teller” (Wilkie, 2002, p. 158) – becoming a “space of encounter” (Wilkie, 2008, p. 101) which I in turn engaged with, closing that feedback system through my “personal account of experience and of place” (Pearson, 2010, p. 15), in the form of these short textual responses.

I thought I would share those initial accounts as it may be helpful at points throughout my personal process of discovery to refer back to those first thoughts, unadulterated by expectation or research, that I had during my exploration of the Grandstand. Equally, they may help others to augment their own responses to the Grandstand, encouraging engagement with the site, either through the validity they might find in the correlations between my thoughts and theirs, or the challenge my reply to the site might pose to theirs if significantly different. The following are reproduced verbatim from my original response.

The Main Hall

Rough and ready. Plastic chairs stacked in a corner, no system, ready for use whenever. Lights hang from chains and, occasionally, a flicker. Scuffs to paintwork and chipped skirting boards. Battered steel pillars, engraved “PORTER & CỌ LINCOLN”. Rough, tactile brickwork exposed to become a ‘feature’. Electric heaters crudely affixed to walls; a warm pool of orange glow.

The Bar

Darkness – all I see is by the light cast through the door I lean against to hold open. A musty, unused smell. No longer a bar but a storeroom, children’s entertainment replacing the liquid of adult entertainment. Walls and metal grilles imprison things. An old triangle to call “time, gentlemen, please”, oddly out of place now.

The Cleaner’s Cupboard

Cold metal storage containers, ladders, padlocks, a Jewson spade, “Back Britain, Buy British”, the cleaning rota, whitewash, paint, bulbs, a small bingo game, air freshener, chemicals, a fan, a bucket containing some murky water, pine gel, Henry the Hoover, “Christmas Decorations, Do Not Move”, an alarm procedure entirely in CAPS LOCK.

Caretakers Office

Oddly hidden away, out of site – how does the caretaker oversee their kingdom? Perhaps a convenient place to slip away for some shut-eye; it might explain the pillows and the blankets. Ordered and organised but not ‘lived in’. An unloved, functional place. Two visitor chairs, keys in a box on the wall, labelled by number. Notice: “IMPORTANT: MAKE SURE THURSDAY AFTER LITTLE MONKEYS THAT THE BINS ARE TAKEN OUT OF BIN STORE.”

Corridor

People passing through, more useless objects with nowhere to be kept stored here. A small sticker on a door: “Warning: Contains Asbestos.”

 

References

Kwon, M. (2004) One Place After Another. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lorimer, H. (2006) Herding memories of humans and animals, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 497-518.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wilkie, F. (2002) Archaeologies of memory: Mike Pearson’s Bubbling Tom. Unpublished paper.

Wilkie, F. (2008) The production of “site”: Site-Specific Theatre. In: Holdsworth, N. and Luckhurt, M. (eds.) Contemporary British and Irish Drama. Oxford: Blackwell.