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.
Campaigners had feared the flat, known as Ron’s Place, would be stripped of its art and lost forever after the house it is in was put up for auction.
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.
The aspiration was thrown into doubt when the property owner unexpectedly put it up for sale with a guide price of between £325,000 and £350,000.
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.
