Have weekending hipsters uprooted Derek Jarman’s legacy?

When he died, 30 years ago today, the outspoken indie filmmaker could never have imagined he would be best remembered not for his homoerotic epics or his public battle with Aids, but for the wild Dungeness garden that now swarms with down-from-Londoners, says Paul Clements

Derek Jarman in his shingle garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness (Alamy)

Fancy a trip to the seaside? I thought we could visit the coast where Derek Jarman started a garden? You know, that bit with the dilapidated fisherman’s cottage that he did up while he was dying with Aids? Dungeness has some great beach walks and loads of seafood places these days – oh, and I’ve had a look on coolstays.com, and there are some really smart cabins on the seafront you can rent, too, so we could even make a weekend of it...

Derek Jarman was – to paraphrase a platitude popular in travel writing – a man of contrasts. The son of an RAF bomber commander, he was, by his own reckoning, “a nice middle-class boy” who became a punk film director, an accomplished painter of more than 400 canvases, a costume and set designer, outspoken gay rights campaigner, keeper of uproarious diaries, and the public face of HIV at the height of the Aids crisis.

Now, three decades after his death – 30 years ago today, aged 52, from Aids-related illnesses that left him with tuberculosis of the liver and robbed him of his sight, but not his iconoclasm – he’s also the unlikely poster boy for the Kent tourist board, his Prospect Cottage on every weekending hipster’s must-see list.