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Dial House is a farm cottage situated in south-west Essex, England that has been a self-sustaining anarcho-pacifist open house since 1967. The house is located in the countryside of Epping Forest in Ongar Great Park. It has been used as a base for a number of cultural, artistic, and political projects ranging from avant-garde jazz events to helping found the free festival movement.

Perhaps the best-known manifestation of the public face of Dial House was the anarcho-punk band Crass. Following the DIY punk ethic, Crass combined the use of song, film, sound collage and graphics to launch a critical polemic against a mainstream which they considered to be built on foundations of war, religion, and consumerism.

History

Early history

Dial House, a large rambling farm cottage, was built in the 16th century. Oliver Rackham describes Ongar Great Park as possibly having been the "prototype deer park", mentioned in an "Anglo-Saxon will of 1045". During the Victorian era, Dial House was the home of the writer Primrose McConnell, a tenant farmer and the author of The Agricultural Notebook (1883), which is recognised as a standard reference work for the European farming industry. By 1967 Dial House stood derelict, its acre of garden a bramble-smothered wilderness. Dial House is Grade II listed on the National Heritage List for England.

References

1. See "crass retirement cottage," nest magazine #21, summer 2003, pp 106-121
2. Rackham, Oliver; Woodlands, Collins, 2006, ISBN 0-00-720244-X
3. Historic England, "Dial House (1306769)", National Heritage List for England, retrieved 9 May 2017

External links

• 'Dial House under threat'
• Compost Toilet building workshop at Dial House, summer 2002

51°42′44″N 0°11′21″E / 51.7122°N 0.1893°E / 51.7122; 0.1893

• Crass
• Houses in Essex
• Social centres in the United Kingdom
• British intentional communities
• Legalized squats
• Squats in the United Kingdom
• Epping Forest District
• Grade II listed houses
• Grade II listed buildings in Essex