RON'S PLACE

First published: Autumn 2024

British filmmaker Martin Wallace writes about how he travelled the world searching for extraordinary art environments, only to find one on his own doorstep... just as it was about to be destroyed

The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier famously described a house as a “machine for living in”. I doubt that Ron Gittins would have shared this view. The roots of Gittins’ inspiration sprout from ancient history. His house is more indebted to ghosts than machines. Ron’s Place (as it is now known) has nothing to do with utilitarian functionalism and everything to do with a sustained eruption of expressive passion. Gittins’ house is an outgrowth of him; an ossification of his private obsessions, and a painstaking manifestation of his romantic fantasies and creative talents.

Fresco of an eighteenth-century galleon in the Bay of Naples, with a frieze of nautical explorers and ships across the ages, under an unfinished ceiling. Courtesy: Martin Wallace

I suspect Gittins may have favoured the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s take on the concept of house: “our house is our corner of the world” – an epithet hinting at the primordial distinction between the self and non-self, where home is a site of retreat and mediation. Few people entered Gittins’ house in his lifetime. He led a spartan existence with minimal creature comforts. For the last 40 years or so of his life, he survived on disability benefits, and for many years he managed without running water, due to a petulant dispute with his landlord and the water company. But this was his corner of the world. Ron’s rules.

the Lion Room, with its Roman-style murals and frieze, is strewn with parts of life-size, papier-mâché figures; courtesy: Historic England

Bachelard was alive to the emotional resonance and psychological symbolism of a house. As he put it, it “protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace”. For 33 years – between 1986, when Gittins moved in aged 47, and his death in 2019 at the age of 79 – he used his house, in a suburban street in the town of Birkenhead, in northwest England, to dream in peace. And, boy, did he dream.