A drift put simply where you go for a walk through your local town or city with no destination or purpose in order to find the things mostly overlooked by the people who do have a purpose and a destination in their journey. The art form of drifting has evolved from the romantic walking that came about in Europe during the late eighteenth century which was a response against the age of enlightenment that was occurring around the time ‘a reaction against the material changes in society, which accompanied the emerging and expanding industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century’ ((Oosthoek, Jan (1999) ‘Romantic Movement, late 18th and early 19th century’ online http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_romantic.html (accessed 25th March 2013) )) the idea was to get back to nature, that nature was the key; the Romantic Movement was this alienation of the city and the move back to the nature because nature was seen as pure .
Drifting evolved from the Romantic Movement to being about the journey rather than on a destination (back to nature). Instead, it has the aim of ruling out destination altogether ‘first, separation from the community, then a plunge into flux in a liminal space, finally reintegration back into the community’ ((Smith, Phil (2010) Mythogeography: The art of Walking sideways Triarchy Press))the idea of plunging into a flux is that of getting, essentially, lost; this is so you do not rely on where you are going or sign posts or directions to interrupt the flow of walking that is supposed to be coming subconsciously. However, this form of reintegrating back into community is warned about ‘collapsing back into the everyday and missing the whole point’. In order to overcome this lapse back into the norm and forgetting all about the drift you can do little exercises or tasks to change the route or drift completely. For example, you could have the person use a large leaf as a map, or as they are walking have them look up at the tops of the buildings they walk past.
Linking the idea of drifting back to the Grandstand we can look at the old romantic walking of the eighteenth century. The romantic walking was about getting back to routes, essentially to nature, but with the Grandstand we could look at getting back to its original use of being a racecourse. Furthermore, since the Grandstand is empty, we can look at it as a non-place, or a place generally forgotten by the public; this echoes the ideologies of drifting since the focus of a drift is to find something generally overlooked by the public.