Prospect Cottage, Dungeness
Filmmaker Derek Jarman's former home on the English coast coaxes beauty out of modest surroundings
On the south-east coast of England, 100 metres or so from where the shingle shelves steeply down into the English Channel, lies Prospect Cottage, the home of filmmaker Derek Jarman. An old clapboard fisherman’s hut, it was bought by Jarman in 1986 and was his home until he died in 1994. Painted with litres of black pitch, its window frames picked out in sunshine yellow, it looks both modest and striking in the spare landscape of Dungeness. A poem about love and longing by 17th-century metaphysical poet John Donne, “The Sun Rising”, adorns one external wall:
“… Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.”
In this unpromising and starkly beautiful landscape—the largest area of vegetated shingle in Europe—Jarman created a garden. There are no walls to separate it from the land around it, no markers to show where the garden begins and ends—it simply grows out of the landscape as if it had arisen naturally out of the bare rock. Driftwood and other found objects sit like sculptures in amongst the gorse, wildflowers and sea kale. It is a triumph of hope and creative inspiration and still draws people to see it, a reminder of how beauty can be brought forth from the most modest surroundings. In his own words, “paradise haunts gardens and some gardens are paradises. Mine is one of them.”
[A version of this article was first published in Issue 1 of Fieldfare]