finding dial house

Once upon a time, after he had changed his name (naming himself after how much it cost to use a public toilet back then), 23-year-old Penny Rimbaud rode his motorcycle up to the dilapidated farm house. He knew it was the one. He had been riding up and down the English countryside looking for something just like it. Ruined cottages were all over the place. Nobody wanted them. Things were easier back then, he says now. Penny’s father would help him pay for repairs to the windows, but an old man who lived across the road taught Penny how to fix the house up himself, which Penny ultimately realized was how he wanted to do it.

Penny played the drums in a band called Crass. The band moved into the cottage, and they called it Dial House. One day Penny watched a Chinese film in which a hotel offered free rooms to people in exchange for a story. The film inspired Penny to open Dial House’s doors. Dial House was kept bare to be like a monastery. He kept the walls white and the floor uncarpeted in order not to impose himself on the visitors. People would thus feel they were not in somebody’s house but a limitless creative space. Word got around, and people would show up, seeking a place to write, talk, or take a break from the city. Fifty-one years later, I ask who shows up now. “People in some sort of trouble,” he says, “whether in their relationship, career, intellectually. And a few young people.”

No directions to the house exist on the Internet. If you search for them, you will only find a blog post or two about vague treks into hinterland. I had emailed Penny about arriving and he sent me instructions: where to go, who to look for, what to do if we missed each other. I took the London Underground to a little suburb with a market lining the street. I met Penny’s creative partner Gee Vaucher at a café and we drove down a foggy country road to the house. 

When I arrived, Penny came in from the garden where he was working and said hello. There was no tour. He offered me a cup of tea and said I would have to entertain myself. I at once felt like I had entered a home. Everything had a delicate place: the hanging mugs, the fragile pantry, the organized library. I looked out the window and saw a cultivated, labyrinthian landscape. I felt a little uncomfortable, actually. How could they open their order to the element of chaos? How could they trust strangers not to destroy their sanctuary? The house spoke to me of the nature of vulnerability, and reminded me of my own.

You can tell that a lifetime has been spent with the house in the way the plumbing works phenomenally, the land contains gargantuan trees and thoughtfully twisting paths, and the many rooms are well-furnished, each with a unique personality. I think the house is Penny’s one true love. He took care of her until she appeared—like an entity.

People still show up, the open-door policy remains; however, I was surprised to find not an anarcho-pacifist punk squat, but an artisan’s cottage home. Penny says, “The disappointment in people is sometimes palpable.”