‘It’s not just a cottage, it’s a shrine.’ Writers join bid to save Derek Jarman’s last home

With just two weeks to go until its fate is decided, leading artists have waded into the campaign to save for the nation a fisherman’s shack on a bleak strip of coastline a stone’s throw from a nuclear power station.

Prospect Cottage in Dungeness,

Kent, was the home of the filmmaker, artist and writer Derek Jarman, and has become a place of pilgrimage for those drawn to its stark beauty and enchanting shingle garden.

But the cottage will be sold to a private buyer unless £3.5m can be found by 31 March. It is being sold after the death in 2018 of Keith Collins, Jarman’s partner, to whom he left the cottage.

A crowdfunding campaign launched in January and spearheaded by the charity Art Fund, has raised more than £2,750,000. At the launch of the fund, actress Tilda Swinton, Jarman’s close friend and collaborator, said: “First and foremost, the cottage was always a living thing, a practical toolbox for his work.”

Last week, costume designer Sandy

Powell auctioned the cream suit she wore to the Oscars, which has been signed by 300 Hollywood stars, for £16,000. But with £750,000 still to find, there are concerns the target may be missed, a scenario that has dismayed Jarman’s many fans.

“To me, Prospect Cottage was another manifestation of his visionary, Blakean self,” said the actor Simon

Callow. “In its sparseness and formality, he was showing us the world in a grain of sand, holding infinity in the palm of his hand. It’s the sort of creation that a 17th-century radical, a leveller or a digger, a ranter or a muggletonian might have made – a vision of a better world, which was always on Derek’s