Prospect Cottage

Prospect Cottage is a house on the coast in Dungeness, Kent. Originally a Victorian fisherman's hut,[1][2] the house was purchased by director and artist Derek Jarman in 1986, and was his home until his death in 1994.[3]

Prospect Cottage in May 2007

Jarman bought the house following the death of his father, at a time when he was looking to leave London.[2] Actress and friend Tilda Swinton recalls Jarman buying "gallons of pitch black paint" to redecorate.[2] The timber walls of the cottage are weatherproofed with tar, and one wall is decorated with lines from the John Donne poem "The Sun Rising".[4] Jarman's 1990 film The Garden was filmed at the house.[5]

Sculptures and planting in the garden

Jarman cultivated a garden in the shingle surrounding the cottage, a mixture of sculptures assembled from driftwood and other flotsam from the beaches of Dungeness,[4] and hardy plants which could survive the coastal weather,[6] supported by manure from a local farm dug into small holes in the shingle.[7] Writing of his early months at Prospect Cottage, he said that initially "people thought I was building a garden for magical purposes - a white witch out to get the nuclear power station".[7] Jarman described his garden as "a therapy and a pharmacopoeia",[7] and would go on to write a book about it, Derek Jarman's Garden, illustrated with photographs by Howard Sooley and published posthumously in June 1995. A set of prints of the photographs was acquired by the Garden Museum for its collection in 2012.[8]

The gardeners Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd stumbled across Prospect Cottage and its garden in the summer of 1990; the garden became the inspiration for the Gravel Garden at Beth Chatto Gardens at Elmstead Market in Essex.[9]

After Jarman's death in 1994, the cottage was bequeathed to his partner Keith Collins. The house was put up for sale in 2018 after Collins' death,[3] its interior still containing artwork by Jarman's friends and admirers, including Maggi Hambling, John Maybury, Gus Van Sant and Richard Hamilton.[10]

With the possibility of the house being sold privately, Art Fund launched a campaign in January 2020 to raise money for "a permanently funded programme to conserve and maintain the building, its contents and its garden for the future".[3] The appeal was featured on an episode of BBC1's Countryfile in February 2020, with rare filming inside the cottage allowed for the programme.[11] As part of the fundraising efforts, costume designer Sandy Powell, a friend of Jarman's, collected film stars' signatures on her white suit at the 2020 BAFTAs award show[12] and 2020 Oscars ceremony,[13] with the suit auctioned online between 4 and 11 March by Phillips auction house, London. and selling for £16,000.[14]

The cottage and its garden were the subject of an exhibition at the Garden Museum in London in 2020.[15]