Writers and artists are often inspired by the landscapes they encounter or inhabit, and one of the most distinctive is Dungeness in Kent, on England’s south coast. This headland is punctuated by converted lookout towers, fishermen’s cottages, tanneries and wood-panelled artists’ studios, turquoise crab nets and rusted anchors.
Often dubbed “Britain’s only desert” due to its low rainfall, Dungeness is also occupied by two hulking nuclear power stations – one decommissioned, one still in use – several lighthouses and a miniature railway. The vista is bleak, with sea kale growing out of the stone and shingle beach. The sky is expansive and on clear days, France is just visible across the sea.
Perhaps the most iconic feature of this landscape is artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, which he bought in the late 1980s. It’s painted black with bright yellow windows. When not in London, Jarman made this his sanctuary and planted a garden of poppies, sedum and salvaged driftwood.
In his journal Modern Nature (1989), Jarman describes the fenceless garden as being bordered only by “the horizon”. This was also characteristic of his open attitude towards art in all its forms. The garden doesn’t end at any boundary but spills into the landscape, like a painting without a frame.
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In her introduction to the most recent version of this journal, writer Olivia Laing says: “It was here that I developed a sense of what it meant to be an artist, to be political, even how to plant a garden (playfully, stubbornly, ignoring boundaries, collaborating freely).”
Read more: Time-travelling Derek Jarman is a beacon for the humanities
Jarman’s experimental film The Garden (1990) was filmed here. It explores religion and sexuality and features a young Tilda Swinton. In Modern Nature, Jarman not only chronicles the seasonal cycles of his garden and “the Ness”, but also the politics of 1980s Britain, the Aids crisis, and his own battle with HIV.
In 2020, a campaign to preserve the cottage from private sale was championed by Swinton, who sees it as a site of inspirational power:
Just as Derek was self-determinedly dedicated to process above product, to collective work, to empowering voices that might feel alienated, my excitement about this vision for Prospect Cottage lives in its projected future as an open, inclusive and encouraging machine for the inspiration and functional working lives of those who might come and share in its special qualities – qualities that, as a young artist, I was lucky enough to benefit from alongside Derek and so many of our friends and fellow travellers.
A new generation of artists now has the opportunity to take residence in the cottage, and to experience this rich combination of elements that makes Dungeness a suggestive, creative landscape.
It is full of unusual wildlife, due to the defunct second world war sound mirrors that loom over its vast nature reserve, and the warm runoff water from the power stations.
There are working fishing boats and JCBs, but also charmingly wrecked ones listing on the shingle. But it is also the bleak openness, the absences and spaces which give it a vaguely dystopian air, that might lead a writer or artist to conjure a new fictional world.
When I first encountered it, I was in the early stages of writing a novel – a speculative piece that would explore otherness and alienation. My ideas were in their early stages, the characters not fully crystallised.
When novelists use a real-life setting for fiction, it’s a delicate form of interrelation. But a real landscape provides a backdrop, an anchoring in reality that allows the imagination to take flight.
Embossed on the side of Prospect Cottage is a verse from Elizabethan poet John Donne’s The Sunne Rising (1633), a poem whose sentiment is to put love and living above the inevitable movement of the sun and the passage of time:
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
For me, this choice of quote chimes with my novel, The Headland (2024), which has dual timelines: one in the late 1980s; the other amid the politics of the present day, with the refugee crisis, climate change and threats from the far right.
It features a fictional version of Prospect Cottage and explores the elemental power of storms. A place like Dungeness, with its unusual combination of features, is both timeless and ever-changing. In some strange way it feels unreal, like a dream or a fiction.
This is why it provides such a rich seam of creative inspiration for Jarman, and for the artists and writers touched by his work and the landscape itself.
Abi Curtis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
