Penny Rimbaud

In 1967, Penny Rimbaud moved into Dial House, a derelict farm cottage on the fringe of Epping Forest in Essex. He and visual artist Gee Vaucher duly set about turning the 16th century pile into a centre for radical creativity and anarcho-pacifist ideals. For Rimbaud – then still going under his birth name of Jeremy Ratter – it marked the beginning of the rest of his life.

“I moved here when I was teaching part-time at art school,” he tells via Zoom, seated by the window inside Dial House. “After a while I got very tired of teaching and walked out. That’s when I set up this open house, partly because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d got all this sort of debris built up – of trying to make a life as a semi-professional teacher – and the only way I could deal with it was by getting rid of everything and seeing what happened. One weekend I invited as many people as possible to come along and just take