When we first started this project Emma, Charlie, Rachel, Kash and myself came together originally as a group because we all shared an interest in a document we had found at the Lincolnshire archives. The document in question was a 1939 plan to turn the grandstand in to a mortuary if Lincoln was badly bombed in the Second World War and there became a need for it. Seeing this document made us think about the loss and loneliness that the people would have felt during the war and how this linked to the building itself. We already knew that the grandstand had once been a hub of activity due to the Lincoln Handicap races that were once ran there but then, from hearing others ideas and research, we discovered that the grand stand was actually once part of a number of buildings that had once all stood around it. Over time these buildings had all been demolished, leaving the Grandstand all on its own. It had lost not only the event that gave it purpose but also the other buildings that surrounded it leaving it practically useless as a modern structure.
Our first idea was to bring a bit of that same racing atmosphere back to the building. To give life to a building whose purpose was lost in the past. By this we wanted to get the feeling of bets being placed and the feel of being so close to horses and the thrill of winning or losing! However saying this, we still wanted to have a hint of the lost history as well pertaining to the document we had found at the archives. The first idea we had was to have an outline of a horse on the floor of the main room with a projection of the grandstand on the back wall. This would then be surrounded by pictures of how the grandstand used to be reminding audiences of the grand history the building held. In order to be gain some feeling of what the atmosphere may have been like, Kash, Rachel and I decided to go to the William Hill betting shop and places bets of our own! Even though we weren’t very successful in the bets we placed, the shop did give us a hit of inspiration.
All around the walls of William Hill were copies of the Racing Post. The idea to plaster the walls with the same newspaper came to us from this experience. Using the original idea as a foundation our idea then evolved to include this new inspiration. Right now we are still working on the logistics of this and trying to decide how we can incorporate everything we want to do into the one performance while still not losing anything that helped us to come up with the idea in the first place. I feel our overall aim is to bring back an actual history of the grandstand infused with a proposed history all embodied together as one linear strand.