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’. The project borrowed directly from practices at the vast Burning Man Festival in Nevada, but were transplanted into a very different cultural and social location. This paper explores how this ritual came to take place, noting the extent to which its creators stressed that its meaning should be weighed up by those in the crowd rather than imposed by the event’s organisers. It will be suggested that factors shaping this event are the decline of church influence in Britain, the transnational nature of memory cultures, and the extent to which the pandemic has produced no single mode of publicly ritualising bereavement.