Dial House, Essex

Dial House is a farm cottage situated in south-west Essex, England. The house is located in the countryside of Epping Forest in Ongar Great Park, an area covering 5-by-3 kilometres. Dial House is an intentional community and the home of the anarcho-punk band Crass.

Since 1967, Dial House has been an anarchist-pacifist open house and the base of operations 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 that is built on foundations of war, religion, and consumerism.

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.

It was here that artist, writer and philosopher Penny Rimbaud set up home and a studio with two fellow art school lecturers with whom he engaged in the long-term process of making the property habitable and the garden workable. The property was sublet from the adjacent farm at a minimal rent in recognition of the high maintenance expenses for which the tenant was responsible. The land upon which the house and the farm stood was, in turn, owned by the GPO and tenanted to the current farmer.

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