The Director’s Hut

From miles away on the A259, across Denge Marsh, you can see the Dungeness nuclear power stations as great grey masses brooding over the sea. At the village of Lydd they still seem to be miles away, and as you drive towards them on to the world’s largest shingle peninsula the landscape changes dramatically, becoming a stark windswept expanse of gravel pits dotted with large lakes of fresh water. The sparse vegetation and the gorse bushes mat themselves into the shingle and bring their own particular mixture of birds and plants. A nature reserve lies
right next to the nuclear power stations. And at the entrance gates there is a notice telling you that the facilities are open to the public on Wednesday afternoons.

After the road has crossed the track of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway, the habitations begin again, and we are at once in a world of fishermen and shanty dwellers. The shingle line on the left, which hides the sea from the road, is punctuated by small fishing boats, huts and winches. On the right side, against a backdrop of the nuclear power stations, are the small wooden cottages built by fishermen about 100 years ago. Some are still lived in by their descendants. These cottages are mixed up with a series of railway-carriage dwellings that were placed here before the war as holiday homes. A few of these coaches are left but most have been submerged under additions, so you are not at first aware of them; everything is very much homemade.

There is a riot of building materials: wood, metal, concrete and asbestos, all of which have been used in profusion – an archetypal example of ad-hocery. Many of the houses have a rich history. The imposingly named East India House, which is actually little more than a shack, was the building from which semaphore signals were sent to the company’s ships, and has a tower on it for this precise purpose. The house next to it, the only one made of brick, was built by a gentleman who paid the local boys to hump the bricks here over the shingle; god knows how little he paid for how many bricks, because 80 years ago there were no roads hereat all, just the houses and the shingle. There used to be a railway that went to the lighthouse, but that closed before the war. The roads were only built during the war, when this became a sensitive military area and was heavily mined.

Dungeness is now a conservation area and a mild row has broken out between the inhabitants and the local Shepway Borough Council, who have allowed British Telecom to replace one of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s red telephone kiosks with one of the nondescript substitutes. The council is anxious that Dungeness should not become suburbanised and has issued a circular forbidding fences, building in unsympathetic materials, altering the size of a house substantially, or building any construction more than one storey high.

The notice seems to miss the point as there is no group of houses in the Southeast that has grown in such an unplanned manner; with railway carriages, block-houses, old army buildings and the remains of the Pluto Pipeline from the war, it is a shanty town of do-it-yourself. It is not good manners that have made Dungeness the delightful haphazard place that it is. The houses are set back about 20m from the road; there are neither fences nor gates, and the land in front is patchy soft shingle lightly covered with grass.

A short way along the road is Prospect Cottage, with its black tarred clapboarding and yellow-painted window frames. It is the cottage that film director Derek Jarman bought and came to live in about three years ago, and with which he has fallen totally in love. The front garden has small henges and stones circles made from pebbles and driftwood, and the back garden looks like the purlieus of a Tibetan temple: stakes of driftwood stick up into the air like prayer flags, surmounted by shells, pebbles and bleached bones, while below them the plants are growing strongly out of the shingly ground. They are only able to thrive because many loads of soil and manure lie buried below the shingle.

The cottage consists of four main rooms, with a central passage running from the front door to the narrow kitchen that lies along the back. The internal walls are made from tongue and groove, and all the floors are bare boards. The house is underfurnished with a few good or interestingly functional pieces, but it is full of objets trouvés: stones, bits of iron, battered and rusted tin cans, driftwood and all manner of other flotsam and jetsam that get washed up on the beach. These are carefully and methodically laid out in the back workroom together with discarded action men, votive figures, crucifixes, old shoes – in fact anything that Jarman sees as grist to a new painting; and one senses that, as with all serious artists where there is true sympathy between them, their subject and their materials, these objects have been invested with an animism that makes it by no means a haphazard or unthinking collection.

Jarman’s own paintings hang in all of the rooms, together with work by friends and other artists. A large painting by Robert Medley that hangs over the sofa in the sitting room is entitled Sebastiane, and is autobiographical in the sense that Robert was in the film of that name that Derek made in 1974.

‘Apart from the gales and the constant winds, the climatic compensations are two weeks less frost than anywhere else, the least rainfall and the highest amount of sunshine,’ claims Derek. ‘When I got here the house had been done up. Fitted carpets with dainty wallpaper on chipboard. The first thing that I did was to strip it all back to the original tongue and grooving. One or two of the wooden walls had been painted but some still had the original varnish – the dark rooms have their own charm. It was all stop and go, and after a while I gave up. I am one of those people who never finish a job; I will paint a room but there will always be a corner left out where the original colour still shows. I bought the cottage from the widow of the local publican. The pub is a wartime barracks that had been painted goose­turd green. I built the outside west wall myself, and tar­varnished the whole of the outside. All these houses were originally tar­varnished. I have tried to keep the cottage just as it was – the name Prospect and the yellow window frames included.’

Derek Jarman describes his new book – which has yet to be given a title – as a day book, ‘an autobiographical gardening book for this area. I have always wanted a garden and here at last was a place to make one, especially as all the neighbours said that nothing would grow,’ he says. ‘Although in the old days there were vegetable patches down here, it was before there were roads and the earth had to be brought here on the railway that went up to the lighthouse. So I quickly realised that if I buried earth under the shingle I would be able to grow things, and I could have a combination of an English gnome garden and a Japanese garden. I can’t grow thyme and there’s a slight problem with sage, but the rosemary is now in its second year and the lavender and cotton lavender seem to be perfectly all right.

A version of this article appeared in the November 1989 and June 2019 issues of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers

To mark 30 years since Derek Jarman’s death, Creative Folkestone invite audiences from across the world to watch a sunset from Dungeness and Prospect Cottage on the anniversary of Jarman’s death. The live broadcast of Prospect Cottage: Sunset made by filmmaker Clare Unsworth can be found via @creativefstone