‘The last house in England’: living in Dungeness

Gilbert McCarragher’s house, Channel View, is the last on the row. “We often wonder if we are the last house in England because we’re an outshoot on the peninsula.” We are sitting at his table. Behind his shoulder is one of the large floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the scene: a hodgepodge of gorse and obscure flowering plants, fishing boats rammed into a shingle berm, beyond them a sliver of sea and a cloud-marbled sky. Were it a clear day, the reciprocal edge of France would just be visible.

“I wanted this house to be a camera obscura: it has to pull the outside inside,” says McCarragher, an architectural photographer who worked for the minimalist architect John Pawson. He has also just released a book of photographs of Derek Jarman’s cottage, one of the other 99 hut-houses on the Dungeness Estate, a spit of shingle on the south coast of England.

It is an unearthly place. Two nuclear power plants, in the process of being decommissioned, stand on the skyline. A spider’s web of overhead wires spans into the Kent countryside behind. The 1961 lighthouse stands at attention nearby to warn ships of the land, flashing the sea at night.

But what makes it equally strange is its openness. There is virtually no fencing of gardens — the rules of the estate. “There’s nothing to stop your eye from moving forward,” says McCarragher. Jarman said the boundaries of his garden were the horizon.

Day-trippers to the coast walk straight up to people’s houses. A neighbour, a recognisable actress now deceased, used to go to the window and bare her breasts at the window when anyone came too close to her house. That ended when someone explained social media to her. Prospect Cottage, the former house of Jarman, and later inhabited by his companion Keith Collins, had a sign on the door asking people to stop knocking.

“I think it’s quite rich to build a Modernist house down here and then not expect people to come and press their noses against the window. I’ve really no problem with that and very often I will say ‘do you want to come and have a cup of tea or something?’ I’m very happy to show off our lovely house.”

But the site has nuclear police on patrol and, recently, high-tech CCTV cameras were installed next to the lighthouse, scanning the sea for migrants in “small boats”. The shingle plains of Dungeness are an observatory from every angle.

Is it a strange place to live? The community is a mix of old fishing families — the Thomases are the owners of the boats wedged in the shingle — and the down-from-London brigade. The estate is a mix of caravans and Bentleys. Jarman was not the only creative. Residents include a well-known choreographer and a lawyer who represents some of the world’s top artists. Philosopher Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture project has a thoughtful building there, designed for Airbnb-style stays. But many of the hut-houses remain as clapperboard with corrugated tin roofs, looking on the verge of being blown away.

How McCarragher chose to rebuild his own home is the story of moving from a place of closedness to openness. He started life in South Armagh, Northern Ireland, the sixth and last child in a Protestant farming family. He was taken out of school to help pull potatoes every October and deliberately didn’t learn to drive a tractor. His mother died when he was 11. While his older siblings were out and his father was at the pub, he was getting an alternative education watching Channel 4, the fourth terrestrial channel with edgy, more modern programming. 

In 1985, when McCarragher was around 15, Channel 4 screened Sebastiane, a 1976 film by Derek Jarman about the obsession of a Roman soldier with a Christian martyr. The time of its television debut was the era of the Aids crisis and also of the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse. “The lead-up to that in the press was horrible: ‘Do not watch this. This is perverted. It’s subversive.’” So, of course, he did, with a hand on the dial of the television in his bedroom in case his family came home.

“I was blown away that I was suddenly given permission for my eyes to linger on the male form in a way that if you would have done it in your day to day life, you would have got hit.”

McCarragher found his way out of South Armagh when he was 20 to go to art school at Central Saint Martins in London, initially to study design before moving into film. When at the end of his course he had few prospects for employment, his tutor hired him to be a manny — a male nanny — to her children. Passed on to other families, he found himself in the household of John Pawson and his wife Catherine. Pawson hired him into his firm, where he became the photographer.

“Architects very often think, when they are designing a building, in terms of five or six shots that are going to define it,” says McCarragher. “But I was always trying to think, how do we look at this in a different way.” He was “trying to get to the moment when the building starts talking to you”.

‘What I want to do inside is to have framed views because in Dungeness the sky is really big and the shingle so sweeping. It is really easy for your eye to get lost’

It was in 2008 when he and his partner (now husband) Paul, a chef for Marco Pierre White, bought the house in Dungeness. They had been looking in Rye, a nearby chocolate-box town with a fish and chips culture, when they saw the advertisement in an estate agent’s window by chance and fought off 10 other bidders to acquire the seaside shack for £153,000. McCarragher had visited Dungeness before to see Jarman’s garden — every art student had — but hadn’t considered buying until he saw Channel View.

It was 80 square metres and had wooden walls that did not meet the floor. In the first year, snow drifted in. At its heart was a strange thing: a railway carriage. It is one of several on Dungeness. A mainline branch terminated at the estate from 1883 until 1953. After the first world war, some of the older Victorian carriages were sold or given to locals and dragged on to the beaches to be used as stores for fishing nets, or huts. Over time they evolved, lean-tos were added and they became houses. 

In several of the 99 huts, the curvature of the top of the carriage is still visible on the roofline, now covered with bitumen felt. One is reputed locally to be Queen Victoria’s royal carriage. Another has a raised lantern roof — an old guard’s van. When McCarragher first arrived at Channel View, he didn’t identify the carriage in it, the wooden carcass being so embedded in the house.

He and Paul camped out in the building at first in tents, while commuting back and forth to the city. “We would have our lives up in London doing all these stressful things,” he recalls. They were living in the Brutalist Barbican at the time. “And then we could come shooting through the Blackwall Tunnel [out of the city] and feel you could breathe again. We would have these wonderful weekends down there in the most rudimentary surroundings you could imagine.”

They introduced themselves to the community through food — banquets for up to 30 people in a dining table set up in the railway carriage, with Paul cooking it all up on a two-ring Baby Belling. The Thomas family introduced themselves when June, the matriarch, appeared with a gift of fresh fish on a Good Friday.

Also still on the peninsula was Jarman’s companion, Keith Collins, who first turned up on a skateboard at their house. After Jarman’s death Collins was given work by the Thomas family on their fishing boats. “He was really respected and loved.”

Getting to know the house, and the views, they began to think about planning and rebuilding. Dungeness is an area of special scientific interest which made it particularly challenging. Yet, throughout an arduous planning process, they had the support of the locals, unusual for such a small community into which the down-from-towners move. The absorption of the outsider has been an unexpected feature of the area.

It’s split about 50-50 between long-term locals and more recent arrivals, says McCarragher. Towards incomers, “there’s no animosity, it’s actually a kind of curiosity. They usually know it’s going to be somebody who is creative, a writer or artist who is going to have a good story to tell.”

Jarman received his HIV+ diagnosis in 1986 and bought Prospect Cottage around the same time. He was open about his condition despite public fear. “I wondered what it would have been like, tucked deep here into the end of England.” He asked Ken Thomas, the patriarch of the fishing family, who recounted that Jarman was “very polite, spoke nicely — he’d always be asking for a piece of driftwood, or walking the beach with his carpet bag full of stones”. 

Jarman died in 1994. Collins took on the duties of looking after Prospect Cottage, tarring its black boards annually against the weather and tending the garden Jarman had created — sculptures, stones, driftwood and plants that survived the scalding winds. In 2018, Collins was back in London working as a driver on the Underground’s Bakerloo line when news came through to Dungeness that he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour.

One of the neighbours, a trustee of the Keith Collins Will Trust, called McCarragher and asked him to go and make a visual inventory of Prospect Cottage, not knowing what would happen next. This developed later into the book, Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House, that has just been released.

The launch party was in the new house he’d rebuilt in 2016, with the architecture firm We Not I. Jarman’s house is wood, with artistic details in nooks, and small paned windows. McCarragher’s is minimalist, with large clear glass windows.

“What I want to do inside is to have framed views because in Dungeness the sky is really big and the shingle so sweeping. It is really easy for your eye to get lost.” There’s a porthole window in the bedroom and shutters lined with copper that reflect the sun. The floors are whitewashed plywood. The walls are raw pink plaster, sealed. Glass, plaster and plywood meet on an X, Y, Z axis, light playing off the surfaces.

The weather sweeps in, the view changing in minutes. Their dog Broughan spends hours looking out of the window.

The railway carriage, with its wooden ribs and peeling buttery yellow and green paint, is lined up to face another large window with the view of the lighthouse and its new cameras, which whirr around trying to find their subjects.

“I can only imagine how far those cameras can see. You know it’s probably looking right in our house as well.” They appeared last year, according to McCarragher. Dungeness, being one of the closest points to France (the narrowest is Dover to Calais) has a fair number of landings of small boats. When it happens, the police turn up and the people are processed on the beach before being taken away on a coach.

What does the community think about it? “They are concerned about their safety, some people go out and offer cups of tea. It’s miserable.”

Dungeness itself faces a question too of how open it wants to be, how much of the outside world it wants to draw into its own camera obscura. There are questions about whether there are too many visitors and discussions about charging or having a toll road. “I find that horrifying.” says McCarragher. “A lot of people who moved here at some point in their lives came here as a day-tripper. To take that right away from other people is mean.”

But its closedness has also given him a new perspective. “I moved from Northern Ireland, running away from this small farming community where we had an open-door policy, to London where everyone is very discreet and didn’t know your neighbours. Suddenly I found myself drawn to this place on the coast. I’ve drawn hope. Back to the kind of community I was trying to run away from, but appreciating what that community was.”

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