Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman's House

‘Its exterior is one of the most photographed in Britain — but the inside of the artist and director’s home has seldom been seen, until now… a riveting portrait of the later years of an important British artist’ Sunday Times

Over a near-decade from 1986, the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman and his partner Keith Collins created a home and sanctuary at Prospect Cottage. After Jarman’s death in 1994, Collins hung net curtains to shield the home they had shared from the eyes of visitors to Prospect’s world-famous garden.

In 2018, the photographer Gilbert McCarragher, a friend and neighbour in Dungeness, was asked to record the house, a vital artwork in its own right. It was the first time this private world had been so extensively chronicled. Unfolding room by room, McCarragher’s photographs are accompanied by reflective essays that take the reader inside Prospect Cottage, revealing something of its history and his experience of photographing there.