An extraordinary palace of outsider art secretly created in a ground-floor flat in Birkenhead has been saved after a last-minute cash loan offer from a benefactor.
On Wednesday morning, however, the day of the sale, a message came through from a representative of the benefactor to say they would lend them the money to buy the property.
The art in the flat was created over three decades by its tenant Ron Gittins, who died in 2019. It includes vast fireplaces of a lion and a minotaur and classically inspired paintings on ceilings, walls and floors.
The plan had always been for it to be conserved and the flat used as a community resource promoting art and mental health awareness.
After the benefactor’s intervention, it fell to the film-maker and Ron’s Place supporter Martin Wallace to take part in the online bidding process, which he won with a bid of £335,000.
“I’m feeling a little bit dazed really,” said Wallace. “I’m frazzled. To be unexpectedly bidding for a house is just absolutely surreal. We’re all sitting here in a pub having a cup of tea thinking ‘are we still asleep?’”
He praised the “outstanding generosity” of the benefactor, Tamsin Wimhurst, a social historian who with her husband, Mike Muller, runs a charitable trust. They were also responsible for saving David Parr House in Cambridge, a terraced house with remarkable arts and crafts decoration created by its ownerover 40 years.
To Wallace’s relief there was no bidding war for Ron’s Place. Campaigners had started on the process of securing listed status for the flat and its contents, and Wallace thinks that may have deterred other buyers.
When he spoke to the auctioneer’s office afterwards, he said “all of the staff there were absolutely thrilled on our behalf because it has struck a chord locally”.
Gittins’ niece Jan Williams, also an artist said she was “absolutely completely gobsmacked” that Ron’s Place had been saved. “There were times yesterday when I felt totally demoralised, and then we had to hand over the keys at 4.30pm. But then we got this message.
“We’ve had so many people fighting our corner and we are just really buoyed up by the love and support we’ve had.”
Wallace and Williams said the hard work started now. The aim of the specially created Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust is not to preserve Gittins’ work for preservation sake, they say, but create a place that inspires others.
“What is noticeable is that everyone who comes here has a kind of childlike response,” Wallace said last year. “There is something fascinating and stimulating and uplifting about it … maybe something a bit sad about it as well.”
Gittins took on the flat’s tenancy in 1986 and the agreement allowed him to decorate it in his own taste.
He rarely invited anyone in and so the discovery of that taste, after his death, was a surprise to say the least.
It is a place thatbstops visitors in their tracks. The hallway has an Egyptian tomb vibe, the front room is possibly Pompeii-inspired and in the kitchen is what seems to be a Roman altar.
The huge fearsome lion fireplace is remarkable, “unbelievable really,” Jarvis Cocker, also a Ron’s Place supporter, said.
“We can all relate to people who do their houses up. Everybody decorates their house in some way. Ron has just gone that extra mile.
“I have always been interested in the art of people who haven’t gone through the normal channels, they haven’t gone to art college and stuff like that. They have an idea and they follow it through. We all have creativity within us.”
Along with the works obsessively and painstakingly painted and sculpted on to walls and ceilings, Gittins also created papier-mache figures and costumes.
One is the uniform of a Grenadier Guard, which Gittins wore to march up and down with a papier-mache musket outside a nursing home that he was in a dispute with on behalf of his mother.
“People would find him funny, provocative, a bloody nuisance, but there was also a method to his madness,” said Wallace, who is making a feature-length documentary about Gittins and is on the advisory board of Ron’s Place.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
