The director’s cuttings: a tour of Terry Gilliam’s garden

The film-maker’s English garden reflects his cinematic eye – a fantasy of bell towers, cannons and galleons

Victoria Summerley
Saturday 14 October 2017 11.00 BST

Like his films, Terry Gilliam’s garden is a mixture of the prosaic and the phantasmagorical. For a start, there’s the church spire. “We were having a new kitchen done and one of the builders said to me that a mate of his was salvaging a bell tower in Guildford, and did I want it?” Gilliam says. “It’s 17th century, the same age as the house. So they brought it up here and we put it in the garden.”
Then there’s the immense yew topiary in the shape of a galleon, inspired by the poster for his 1981 film Time Bandits; and two cannons from the set of The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen.

When the Gilliams moved to this corner of north London, however, the garden was “one big boring rectangle”, according to Gilliam’s wife, Maggie. Their house is one of three carved out of a larger property, and you could tell whose garden was whose only because each neighbour mowed their grass in a different direction. They had a small rose garden, but there were no features or boundaries.