Radar

Dungeness is one of the strangest and most beautiful places in England, a vast shingle headland jutting into the Channel on the Kent coast, so flat and bare it is often called the country's only desert. It is a national nature reserve, scattered with wildflowers, old fishing boats and tarred huts, a miniature steam railway, two lighthouses and a nuclear power station on the horizon. Along the foreshore runs a line of working buildings, lighthouse, radar, fog signal and coastguard lookout, with Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage and its garden among them. The skies are enormous and the weather comes straight off the sea.

Radar stands on the site of two sheds built in 1961 to test radar equipment for the Decca company, left to fall apart over thirty years until the architects Johnson Naylor and MS-DA rebuilt them. The new structure echoes the form of the originals and the corrugated huts the fishing families once built along the East beach, clad in industrial zinc outside and lined with pale stained oak within, in the bone and soft purple of the shingle and its wildflowers. The old oak sleepers that once held up the sheds were lifted and relaid as the path across the beach to the door. Inside it is calm and snug: a wall of glass onto the shingle, a wood burner, a sauna, a sunken bath looking out to sea, and two terraces for the sunrise and the sunset. Fiona Naylor described it as the kind of place to curl up on the sofa and watch a winter storm blow across the shingle.