Dial House (Essex, England)

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. Dial House is Grade II listed on the National Heritage List for England.

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