"The Mole Man of Hackney has become something of a North London celebrity."
"William Lyttle, who for 40 years lived at 121 Mortimer Road, in Dalston (or De Beauvoir Town if you prefer). During that time he created an extensive network of tunnels below the house to the point where it and the surrounding pavements became structurally unstable."
"Lyttle was evicted from the house by Hackney Council and fined £300,000 to pay for work required to stabilise it. He is now, apparently, missing and the house has been preserved in a limbo state somewhere between dangerous and simply unlivable.
Instead of creating gleaming towers Lyttle buried down, expanding his house outwards from below."
"In an article in the The Times from 2006 Lyttle took the reporter on a tour of the tunnel layout: "This is going to be the leisure centre," he said, sweeping his hand round a large cavern. ìAnd this in here will be the sauna."
"Dandy of the Underworld - Exhibitionist and introvert, driven by obscure motivations."
"The council used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house."
"The whole of the opposite street lost power one day after he tapped into a 450-volt cable."
"There has been movement in the ground," Phillip Wilman, a council surveyor, told Thames magistrates court. "He's fortunate a London bus is not in his front garden. The property is dangerous and liable to flooding."
"William Lyttle denied that he has burrowed under his neighbours' homes, although he admitted to more than 40 years of 'home improvements' on his own land. He told the Guardian the councilís efforts to prevent him from re-entering his property breached his human rights."
"In 2001, the pavement in front of Mr Lyttle's house collapsed, yielding a wide gash in the road. "You could see all the tunnels sprawling out all over the place inside - it was crazy,..."
"I donít mind the title of inventor," he said. "Inventing things that donít work is a brilliant thing, you know. People are asking you what the big secret is. And you know what? There isn't one."
"After council chiefs first uncovered Mr Lyttle's tunnelling activities in 2006 they found skiploads of junk, including the wrecks of four Renault 4 cars, a boat, scrap metal, old baths, fridges and dozens of TV sets."
"The authority filled in the tunnels with concrete in an attempt to stop the property collapsing. It would be worth more than £1 million if renovated."
http://fantasticjournal.blogspot.com/2009/07/architecture-of-degeneration_15.html
