Prospect Cottage: See inside artist Derek Jarman's seaside home for the first time

While its garden is well-trodden, Prospect Cottage’s interiors remained largely private after Derek Jarman, the artist and gay activist, died aged 52 in 1994 from an Aids-related illness. The photographs and essays in my book explain my experience of spending time at the Dungeness house at a transitional point in its history, revealing the care given to it by Jarman’s companion, Keith Collins, across the 24 years following Derek’s death before Collins sadly passed away. 

I let myself in to Prospect and looked around. Collins’s freshly washed shirt and towels, now two weeks dry, waited patiently to be neatly folded and put away. A different fate awaited them now that he was not coming back. I wondered whether they would become part of the record of the cottage’s past, like Jarman’s blue worker’s overalls, carefully folded and neatly stacked on his work bench in the studio.

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The studio bears the bulk of the scars from Jarman’s time in the house. Located past the front room, towards the end of the main hallway, its tongue-and-groove panelled walls and ceiling match the palette of the Spring room and bedroom. But the various colourful paint splatters, blemishes and marks change the feel of the room, giving its rich, sombre tones a greater vibrancy. 

A set of cabinets, fronted with glass doors in thin wooden frames, runs the full length of the wall on the right as you enter. Like the cabinets in the corridor to the garden room, these are kept locked, their small brass keys stored in the same tin in the kitchen.

The cabinets contain various books, among them numerous titles on or by Jarman. They also contain props from his films, his BFI membership card and various awards that he received.

Among the more curious things in the cabinets is a large bronze dildo from Genesis P-Orridge’s band Psychic TV. It is one of several, I gather, that were made to send to record companies who had refused the band a record deal. Exactly how it came to be in Jarman’s possession I’m unsure. (Collins used to joke that it was a cast of Jarman’s cock.)

Beside this are several small plaster busts of establishment figures: Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill and General Charles Napier. Quite what is to be inferred from this conglomeration is anyone’s guess. 

Several of the busts have had their heads removed and replaced by something else: one a piece of shingle, another a rusty tin can. On the opposite side of the room is another cabinet, to which I never could find the key. It contains some of Jarman’s Super 8 cameras.

Resting on top of the bench are jars of paint brushes, tins of paint, opened but now dried out, and a Tupperware container in which Collins stored the wooden letters that had fallen from the John Donne poem, The Sunne Rising, written on the southern exterior wall of the house.

Meticulously carved from wood in Jarman’s penmanship, the poem was added by Collins and cinematographer Peter Fillingham in 1993, a year before Jarman’s death. The clapboard of the cottage (left) provides the lines on which the poem is written. 

Its verse is a challenge to the sun’s authority for daring to try and pull lovers from their bed.

Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House with photography and words by Gilbert McCarragher is out now (Thames & Hudson, £25)

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