Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent, England, UK: the one-time residence of film-maker Derek Jarman, who created the famous shingle garden


Prospect Cottage is a house on the coast in Dungeness, Kent. Originally a Victorian fisherman's hut, the house was purchased by director and artist Derek Jarman in 1986, and was his home until his death in 1994. 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". 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, and hardy plants which could survive the coastal weather, supported by manure from a local farm dug into small holes in the shingle. 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". Jarman described his garden as "a therapy and a pharmacopoeia", 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. Jarman's 1990 film The Garden was also filmed at the house.


Size: 5120px × 3413px
Location: Dungeness, Kent, England, UK
Photo credit: © will Perrett / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No

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