Prospect Cottage information

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 1987, and was his home until his death in 1994.^[3]

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 cottage facade of tarred boards and bright yellow paintwork were maintained by the previous owners.^{[citation needed]} 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]

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 contains 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 cream calico 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]

It was announced in April 2020 that, thanks to these fundraising efforts, Prospect Cottage had been saved for the nation with Creative Folkestone becoming the custodians of the property.^[15] In 2022, a job advert was reported seeking a guardian for the property.^[16]

The cottage and its garden were the subject of an exhibition at the Garden Museum in London in 2020.^[17] In April 2022 the cottage featured in the episode of the BBC Two series Secrets of the Museum that focused on Sandy Powell's autographed suit.^[18]