Let the Crowd Figure Out What It Means: The Ambivalent Religious-Secular Ritual of Mourning at David Best’s ‘Sanctuary’ Memorial

On 28 May 2022, a reported 10,000 people gathered at the Miners Welfare Park in the small English town of Bedworth for the ceremonial burning of a vast wooden COVID-19 memorial named ‘Sanctuary’. Open to visitors over several preceding days, the intricate construction of birch plywood was filled with handwritten messages, photographs, and small objects left there by people who had suffered bereavements. Although funded by local government authorities in the UK, and organised by a British public art group, the memorial was designed and built by the American David Best, known most for his ‘Temples’ which are set ablaze at the vast Burning Man festival in Nevada. 

A key feature of the Sanctuary project was the absence of any clear narrative explanation provided to those who came to watch it burn. Filled with materials related to loss, at 9pm the crowd simply watched a small group of individuals with flaming torches silently process up to the construction and produce the largest conflagration that most of them will have ever seen. Some people cried, some waved glow sticks, some protested at what they saw as distasteful paganism or a waste of public money, and others simply took photos to post on social media. 

Based on interviews with Sanctuary’s organisers and research on the wider context of public memorialisation in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper seeks to interrogate the curious mix of social factors that led to this event. It will suggest that three factors are critical. 

The first is a situation of religious-secular flux in which Christianity has lost a monopoly on framing how public remembrance should be enacted. Best complained of being heckled by local conservative Christians throughout the construction of ‘Sanctuary’, but recent census data (1) confirms that, like much of Western Europe, Britain is going through a rapid downturn in identification with churches. People increasingly self-identifying as ‘non-religious’ has not led to a disappearance of spirituality however (2), with the authority of the self as meaning-maker appearing to have gained ground at the expense of religious institutions. The burning of Sanctuary was an ideal fit with this context, given that it openly invited onlookers to create their own interpretations and provided virtually none of its own.   

The second factor of importance is the growing globalisation of public memorial projects, in which artists move in and out of national contexts, importing designs and ideas into new locations. Such a ‘transnational turn’ in memory cultures has been noted in scholarship for some time (3) and in this instance it is manifested through the transfer of ideas from the countercultural art festival Burning Man to a small town in England several thousand miles away. The change in location has impacts upon the work’s reception however, with the enthusiastic neopaganism of Burning Man’s Temples (4) replaced by more mixed and uncertain reactions in Bedworth. The appeal of bringing Best to the town should nonetheless be understood in the context of what appears to be growing public dissatisfaction with classical models of memorial-building in favour of non-static artworks. Research undertaken by the UK Commission on Covid Commemoration, for example, found that most British people looked unfavourably on building a national pandemic memorial made from durable materials (i.e. the dominant form of memorials associated with the First and Second World Wars). Sanctuary was conceived of as physically temporary from its outset, with its makers arguing that memory of watching its ritual burning would be more impactful and durable than a stone object inserted into civic space.  

A final factor concerns the COVID-19 pandemic itself, with no single form of memorial artwork or ritual appearing to have gained traction in its aftermath. Part of this related to a lack of narrative cohesion concerning the pandemic itself, with people’s experiences spanning bereavement, to suffering produced by lockdowns, to mere inconvenience (5). One outcome is that while there have been a wide range of public memorial rituals attempted in Britain, none have become fixed in the public consciousness in a manner similar to those concerned with war memory. There is consequently an openness to a project like Sanctuary, which takes a form that lacks almost any cultural familiarity to its audiences. 

The paper will ultimately consider the extent to which the Sanctuary event might be thought of as a success. In interview, Best argued that ‘when you make something like that, people figure out how to use it, and there doesn’t need to be a whole lot of explanation’. The existence of the Sanctuary project seems to be a result of a wide range of cultural and social factors, all leading to a situation in which on a summer evening 10,000 people watched a £100,000 wooden memorial going up in flames before their eyes. However, its claim to have been ‘a COVID-19 memorial for the nation’ should be viewed with a degree of scepticism given that it received remarkably little media attention and is now largely unknown outside the Bedworth area. Sanctuary, in the final analysis, may have been more a symptom of public ambivalence regarding traditional public rituals rather than something that meaningfully drew together societal sentiment into a cohesive new form. 

1. Office for National Statistics, ‘Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021’, November 29, 2022, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/bulletins/religionenglandandwales/census2021.
2. Linda Woodhead, ‘The Rise of “No Religion” in Britain: The Emergence of a New Cultural Majority’, Journal of the British Academy, 4 (2016).
3. Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen (eds.), Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017).
4. Lori van Meter, ‘The Temples at Burning Man’, in Mortality, Dying and Death: Global Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by T. Chandler Haliburton and Caroline Edwards (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2008), 243–51.
5. David Vincent, The Fatal Breath: Covid-19 and Society in Britain (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023).