Fay Godwin

Born Feb 1931 Berlin, died May 2005 Hastings

Location: St Clement’s Church, Old Romney

Both Fay Godwin and Derek Jarman were artists who knew Romney marsh so well, they lived in and loved this landscape.  

Fay Godwin is renowned for her black and white landscape photography and her passion for campaigning for public access to the countryside. Godwin's photography ranged from photographs of the British landscape to sensitive portraits of some of the UK's leading literary figures, including Angela Carter and Doris Lessing. We are very grateful that she made a large number of portraits of Derek Jarman, she was a frequent visitor to Dungeness and clearly, to Prospect Cottage.  

Her photographic documentation of the British landscape included publishing many books including Romney Marsh and the Royal Military Canal 1980, and The Saxon Shore Way: from Gravesend to Rye, 1983. Her phenomenal exploration of the Uk led her to an awareness of the threats to nature and how little of our countryside we are allowed access to. She became President of the Ramblers' Association as a way of supporting her environmental activism. In 1987 Fay published Our Forbidden Land to illustrate her profound concerns for land management and ownership. She was appalled by the amount of land held (and unused) by the Ministry of Defence, disturbed by the extensive private estates which prevented the British public from exploring its natural heritage. She was shocked that the National Trust should demand a fee when she photographed landscapes held in trust for the nation. 

‘When people first asked me if I wanted to do environmental work, I declined  - that was for news photographers. But, I realised it wasn’t quite that simple:  a love of the landscape requires a certain environmental awareness, and there is a journalist in me.’