Dungeness, Kent

Sunrise, sunset

It's National Poetry Day in the UK, a celebration of poetry in all its forms involving readings, national radio, and even (praise be) television. What to post on the English Buildings blog to mark these celebrations? Wordsworth's Dove Cottage in Grasmere? Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford? I've decided on a reprise (with a different photograph) of a building I posted way back in 2008 when this blog was just getting into its stride: Prospect Cottage, the home of film-maker Derek Jarman, set on the shingle at Dungeness. I've chosen it, as the sun comes out here in the Cotswolds to illuminate the British autumn, because this wooden house is adorned with lines, themselves picked out in cut wooden letters, from John Donne's poem, 'The Sunne Rising': 'Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windows and through curtaines call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons runne?’

The letters that make up the poem, the same colour as the black walls of the cottage, need strong sunlight on them to be clearly visible and readable, so that the sun itself enhances the effect of this poem about the sun. It feels right, not just because of today's sunshine, but also because it seems appropriate for Jarman, a man who lived for the effects of light on celluloid, for whom light, as it were, was meat, drink, and inspiration. Sadly, Jarman went blind towards the end of his life. Cruel as this was for a film-maker (as for who not?) he took his blindness bravely. Perhaps he knew the consoling words of the great blind Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, a book-lover who landed the enviable job of head of his country's National Library, reflected in a poem about the 'splendid irony' that 'Granted me books and blindness at one touch'. Borges also told us that we should not fear blindness, because 'It is like watching a slow sunset.'

Dungeness, Kent

Around 6,000 acres of shingle, drifts of gorse, sea kale, dock, and yellow horned poppy, scatterings of tin and wooden huts and dwellings (some made out of old railway carriages), two lighthouses, and a pair of nuclear power stations – this is the peculiar mix that is Dungeness, a triangle of windswept land sticking out into the English Channel, east of Rye. Fishing – and, since 1965, fission – have been its industries, and its buildings have long seemed as plain and provisional as the shifting shingle.

In 1986 the film-maker Derek Jarman came to Dungeness and bought Prospect Cottage. He set about making a garden amongst the pebbles, an assemblage of plants, stones, driftwood, scrap iron, and other evocative odds and ends that seem very much at one with the setting. 22 years on, the garden is thriving and well cared-for by Jarman’s partner, Keith Collins, who still lives here. It’s a place of pilgrimage for those who love Jarman’s films, who remember his bravery during his long final illness, or who simply like remarkable gardens. The house itself is a typical weather-boarded Dungeness bungalow and is around 100 years old. Not everyone notices the lines from ‘The Sunne Rising’, by the great 17th-century poet John Donne, set in wooden letters on an end wall of the house: ‘Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windows and through curtaines call on us?’ In the poem, Donne chides the sun for interrupting his time with his loved one, and jokes with typical audacity that his bed and its two occupants make up the entire cosmos anyway. It’s a resonant choice for Jarman, an artist who lived for the light that exposes films, who must have relished Dungeness’s big horizons and vast skies, and who, faced with the prospect of losing his sight, was able to envision a new set of opportunities for a blind film-maker. How typical too that he should have recognized the special character of this neglected corner of England.