Derek Jarman’s beloved home, Prospect Cottage, was nearly lost to the nation.
The iconoclastic queer filmmaker, artist and activist, who died of an Aids-related illness in 1994 aged just 52, bequeathed his home and garden in Dungeness to his companion Keith Collins.
Collins cared for the fisherman’s hut and Jarman’s famous shingle garden until his death in 2018.
With a private sale looming, arts organisations and celebrities rallied to raise the funds required to purchase and preserve the artist’s house in 2020.
Tilda Swinton, Gwendoline Christie, Scarlett Johansson, Renee Zellweger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Sir Elton John and Joaquin Phoenix were among the stars who pledged support.
With £3.5 million raised, the house was passed to the care of Creative Folkstone, who offer limited places for 40-minute tours for fans who make the pilgrimage to the Kent coast.
While the garden and surrounding landscape was well documented by Jarman during his lifetime, the interiors have only recently been revealed to the public.
Photographer Gilbert McCarragher, a friend and neighbour of Collins, was invited to take intimate shots of Prospect Cottage after his unexpected passing.
The resulting series of 160 photographs has been published in a book, Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House.
With a forward by France Borzello, the photographs are accompanied by a highly personal account of McCarragher’s process of shooting the cottage’s rooms as he mourns for his neighbour and recounts intimate details Collins shared of his life with Jarman at Prospect Cottage.
Jarman’s work touches people who never met him, including McCarragher, who first encountered the 1976 film Sebastiane as a closeted gay teenager growing up in Northern Ireland.
“The film ripped through the world of hatred, bigotry, sectarianism, homophobia and religious intolerance I had grown up with. As the small television in my bedroom flickered with intense love and poetry, the darkness and shame I had lived with was driven out,” he writes.
“I will forever be grateful to Derek for that.”
Although Jarman maintained a flat in London and was regularly in the city for meetings and medical treatment, the cottage became a focal point for his work in his final years.
Collins had changed little about Prospect Cottage after Jarman’s passing — save for some net curtains erected in an attempt maintain his privacy from the Jarman devotees who flocked to see the garden.
Jarman had reveled in the isolation of his seaside home in Dungeness, with its backdrop of a looming nuclear reactor.
He had spotted the Victorian-era fisherman’s hut while location scouting in the area with Swinton, who made her cinematic debut in Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio.
Jarman bought the house the year same year the film came out, around the time of his Aids diagnosis.
He spent over a decade filling it with his paintings, making sculptures from driftwood and rosaries from holey stones, etching sweet messages to Collins - who he fondly nicknamed Hinney Beast - onto glass, and coaxing a colourful garden from the stoney coastline.
The wood-lined interiors are laid out in four main rooms: the Spring room where Jarman’s desked faced out towards the coast; the front room; Jarman’s art studio; and a bedroom. The kitchen and a garden room were added as extensions.
McCarragher spent months documenting the house at different times of day and in different seasons, recording the play of light in the dark interior rooms and recording his memories of conversations with Collins.“The interior and exterior have deep connections to nature and to the past occupants. Both transform the inhospitable or the ordinary into something profound, where inhabitants can find what they need to live and to grow,” the photographer writes.
“Together, the house and garden show how Derek confronted his illness. They reveal how Derek cherished and nurtured Keith andhow Keith reciprocated in kind. They reflect the two men’s resilience, and their defiance in the face of mortality,” he continues.
“This was what Prospect, Derek and Keith meant to me, I realized. It is a community, a place, a single masterpiece where each part cares for another and where every part belongs.
“This was the memory I had come to record. This was the memory I would take with me.”
Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House with photography and words by Gilbert McCarragher is published by Thames & Hudson, £25, out now.
