Jarman only lived in the Dungeness cottage for eight years, and even then only as a second home.
But the house and garden are now almost as famous as his films (though he did make a film about The Garden).
He used the house as an escape, from London, from illness, from real life. Backed by a nuclear power station and fronted by the beach, Prospect Cottage and its garden symbolically juxtaposes those sides of life.
McGarragher's beautiful and very personal photographs sell the dream of a bolthole as somewhere to love, to create and to love in. The book forms a perfect companion to Jarman/Howard Sooley's volume focussing on the garden.
After Jarman's death in 1994, the cottage was bequeathed to Jarman's partner Keith Collins. The house was put up for sale in 2018 after Collins' death and now Creative Folkestone looks after it. An exhibition at the Garden Museum in 2020 showed how influential the shingle garden is. Jarman said:‘My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.’
Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House with photography by Gilber McCarragher is published 4th April by Thames & Hudson, £25.
