Celebrating five years of Prospect Cottage in public ownership
Five years after the Art Fund campaign saved Prospect Cottage, Anneka French finds out how Derek Jarman’s life, work and home continue to inspire.
In 2020 Art Fund led the campaign to raise £3.5 million to save Prospect Cottage – the former home, workspace and garden of artist, writer, filmmaker and gay-rights activist Derek Jarman (1942-94) – and its contents.
The campaign quickly surpassed its target, receiving more than 8,000 donations from the public, among them many Art Fund members, alongside major grants including £750,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £500,000 from Art Fund and £250,000 from The Linbury Trust, as well as significant support from the Luma Foundation, the Roger De Haan Charitable Trust, the John Browne Charitable Trust and the Ampersand Foundation.
This success allowed the purchase of Prospect Cottage, previously at risk of being sold privately, and its placement into the custodianship of Creative Folkestone, along with the management of an endowment to support a permanent public programme, maintaining the building, its collection, contents and garden – all of which might otherwise have been lost. Jarman’s archive was placed into the care of Tate.
A former fisherman’s home, Prospect Cottage is an isolated structure on a shingle beach close to Dungeness nuclear power station in Kent, enveloped by an extreme microclimate of salt and wind. Despite all the odds, Jarman managed to create within it a thriving oasis of art and horticulture, finding solace, beauty and inspiration following his move there in 1986, the year he was diagnosed with HIV, which would later take his life.
One major strand of the Prospect Cottage programme is short residencies for artists, academics, writers, gardeners, filmmakers and others interested in Jarman and his work, part of an ongoing effort to widen access, sensitively, to the interior of the building, where few people had previously set foot. The residencies are open-ended, with no prescribed outcome, allowing participants to take full advantage of the site in order to engage their thinking, research and making.
The actress Tilda Swinton, whom Jarman directed in his 1986 film Caravaggio, and a close friend of his, once described Prospect Cottage as a ‘vibrational… living battery’. It’s a definition that Alastair Upton, chief executive of Creative Folkestone, continues to reference, and one he hears echoed in the reflections of those who spend time here.
‘It is an incredibly powerful space,’ said one artist, feeding back anonymously on their residency. ‘I was struck by the intimacy of the home, the feeling of being inside the house and the deeply moving insights around illness and fear I gleaned inside, which are not as palpable from the outside – a space that is so well known and well loved.’
Among the cohort of the residency pilot in 2022 to 2023 were Iranian-born artist Katayoun Jalilipour, Jarman Award-winning artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Turner Prize-nominated artist Luke Fowler. Work made by Fowler during his residency is currently on display in ‘Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature’ at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow (to 4 May).
Site-responsive research done by other residents has been published academically. Political ecologist Kiera Chapman, documentary director Rob Curry and photographic artist Lynda Laird are three of the 14 beneficiaries of the current round of residences running between 2024 and 2026.
Members of the public are equally drawn to Prospect Cottage, which is open throughout most of the year for limited, advance-booking-only tours. ‘Visitors go around the cottage with a gentle guiding,’ says Upton. ‘They get the chance to really experience the place, not in a private way exactly, but in an intimate way.’
The emotional impact of these visits is certainly reflected in the anonymous feedback Creative Folkestone receives. ‘I was absolutely blown away by the location, the property, the atmosphere and the history and story of the property,’ said one visitor. Others praise the level of care given to sensitivities around sexuality, illness, death and grief that are particular to this site.
The public programme at Prospect Cottage has also included screenings of films by Powell and Pressburger in collaboration with the BFI across the cottage’s five rooms and integrated events with the Folkestone Book Festival, also steered by Creative Folkestone, including with the writer Juno Dawson in 2022.
Several artists have also stayed at Prospect Cottage while working on new commissions for the 2025 Folkestone Triennial (19 July to 19 October), a flagship project for Creative Folkestone, which this year will explore themes connected to nature and deep time, closely associated with some of Jarman’s major interests and his ongoing legacy.
Prospect Cottage, Dungeness. 50% off entry with National Art Pass.
‘Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature’, Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, to 4 May. Free entry and 50% off exhibitions with National Art Pass.
Prospect Cottage and its contents were acquired for the public following the 2020 campaign supported by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, The Linbury Trust, the Luma Foundation and the Roger De Haan Charitable Trust as well as those who gave anonymously and the contributions of over 8,000 members of the public.
A version of this article first appeared in the spring 2025 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
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