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Only two hours drive from London, you can find yourself at the end of the world. Surely nowhere, even in Patagonia, is as bleak or as beautiful as Dungeness. Hieronymus Bosch would have liked it here. But until recently, it was regarded as an eyesore.

The road west from Hythe and Dymchurch has a sandy beach on one side, a ribbon of houses on the other, initially pioneered by a few art deco buildings, later filled with 60s bungalows, it forms the unacceptable face of the English seaside. But all this stops abruptly at the Pilot Inn; the sand is replaced by a vast shingle beach, which shelves steeply and has dangerous undercurrents, unsafe for swimming. The English seaside was not interested in Dungeness, and the beach was abandoned to fishermen and squatters who built a scattering of shacks in the days before modern planning regulations. Some of the shacks began life as railway carriages; off the rails, now taken root. For the bungalow dwellers of Greatstone-on-Sea, they were an embarrassment, the wrong side of the tracks.

Dungeness was so unregarded that it was considered a suitable place to site a nuclear power station. At the time when almost every town and village in Europe found others to twin with, no one wanted to twin with Dungeness, not even Chernobyl.

The power station resembles a beached liner: at night, the Titanic as seen from the lifeboats; in daylight, the new QM2 with its exaggerated superstructure. Just offshore, the warm waste water from the power station churns up the sea, attracting plantlife, fish and a feeding frenzy of seagulls. Lines of electricity pylons converge on Dungeness, stalking across the flat countryside in disorderly queues, another feeding frenzy, the road of excess.

The station emits a persistent, unsettling hum audible from over a mile away. On foggy days, it is joined by the mournful, hump-back whale sound of the lighthouse siren.

There are actually two power stations, A and B. Hurricanes and sundry disasters are given proper names, but power stations get letters of the alphabet like hepatitis.

The sea’s traditional cargo of driftwood, twine and cork are now joined by plastic bottles and polystyrene. Polystyrene seemed a good idea at the time, like nuclear power, but only 40 years later, there is not a patch of ocean — even 100 miles south of Cape Horn — where you don’t find lumps of it floating.

The public perception of Dungeness unexpectedly underwent a sea change one day in 1986 when the film maker Derek Jarman took the actress Tilda Swinton for lunch at the Pilot, which was said to serve the best fish and chips in England. He was struck by the area’s otherworldly atmosphere and its unusual light, and driving past he saw a shack for sale, Prospect Cottage, which he bought on impulse for £750. A similar property would now set you back upwards of £100,000, and possibly cheap at the price. Before Jarman, no one realised that tarred weatherboard and corrugated iron could be things of beauty. Most of the other shacks have been smartened up; some now look as though they have just been photographed for the latest style magazines, and possibly have.

Stranger still, Jarman began to plant a garden (the only time it had been seriously planted had been with mines during the war) and it is now as famous an artist’s garden as Monet’s Giverny. What can grow out of this stony rubbish? These are the seeds that fell on stony ground and somehow flourished.

Dungeness is not the waste land it at first appears. The shingle is home to over 600 plant species (there are only 1,800 in the whole of Britain) although few if any of them are for sale in your local garden centre. They are the outsiders of the plant world: burnet roses, gorse, sea kale. Blackthorn grows as ground cover, elder as a dense, neat bush. Jarman’s garden is strong on silver and blue-green foliage; stems bleached like bones; bright colours, reds and yellows — poppies, marigolds and broom. Sea kale is a beautiful plant, changing dramatically through the seasons; the shoots are said to taste better than asparagus, but the plants are very long lived and accumulate stray radiation.

The garden had a modest, unpretentious beginning: a piece of driftwood to prop up a dog rose, circles of chain or fishermen’s cork floats to mark the site of perennials to stop people walking on the young shoots. It became, by accident, a sculpture garden of redundant garden tools, ballcocks, kettles, coil springs and odd rusted objects churned up from the seabed. Flotsam and jetsam are welcome. Freed from its utilitarian purpose, a washed-up rubber glove has belatedly discovered an artistic vocation, becoming a piece of sculpture.

Dungeness pebbles are Henry Moore rather than Brancusi; biscuit brown and flint blue. Stones with holes in them are common along the south Kent coast; in Jarman’s garden, they are perched on top of driftwood spikes like liberty cap mushrooms, or impaled on the twisted tines of a fork like a medlar tree in winter. The garden has miniature stone circles and lines of flints like menhirs.

When we first went to Dungeness, we drove past Prospect Cottage and I thought: “That’s a nice garden; I wonder where Derek Jarman’s one is.” But that was it, and all the better for it, a garden that anyone might have made if they’d thought of the idea first (like most difficult things done well, it looks easy), a garden for people who pick up odd stones on beaches.

And everyone is welcome. “I would have made a gorse hedge here, but the charm of Dungeness is that it has no fences — to build one would go against the grain,” he wrote.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

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