The Mole Man of Hackney has become something of a North London celebrity in recent years, making an appearance as a typically Sinclairian anti-hero in Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, as well as on TV and in numerous national newspapers. For anyone who hasn't heard of him, the Mole Man is 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.
Last year 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. I pass it every day on the bus and there appear to be large parts of it missing behind the scaffolding.
Image of 121 Mortimer Road, via
Whilst looking into the story I came across a number of photographs - the only ones that exist it seems - of the tunnels taken by artist Karen Russo. Last month she had an exhibition (here) which was partly about Lyttle's strange and obsessive creation. In an interview on Don't Panic Russo stated that her interest in Lyttle was his method, which she likened to of an artist: instinctive, sculptural, seemingly without functional or pragmatic justification. "I was amazed to discover the similarities between the thinking of Lyttle and that of the average artist", she said. "The creation of things that don’t work, without functional value, and the obsession involved in the act of making......"
Image: Karen Russo, via
Speaking as an architect there seems to me to be another way to look at it too. Lyttle's work is a form of anti-architecture, a dark mirror image of both architectural technique and its ambitions. Instead of creating gleaming towers Lyttle buried down, expanding his house outwards from below. Instead of careful, law abiding, Building Regulation compliant design he created a dangerous death-trap of a building, tunneling so close to the water tunnel that the house is in danger of flooding and propping up walls and ceilings with household appliances and makeshift supports.
Most intriguingly Lyttle's own description of the work act as a bizarre parody of architectural presentations. 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. “And this in here will be the sauna."
Image: Karen Russo, via
Apparently no drawings or sketches exist of Lyttle's designs because he never made any. Instead, his tunnels are like an architectural stream of consciousness, a seemingly unplanned, undrawn (and therefore undesigned, in conventional terms) building, where one bit links to the next instinctively and without any obvious overall order.
As he tunneled, extending the house downwards, Lyttle filled the rooms above ground with the excavated clay, rendering them literally uninhabitable. Not for him the glass walled, light filled extensions attached to any number of houses in the same area. Dark, dank and dangerous, his extensive modifications are the opposite of home improvement. The whole house in fact is like an inversion of the gentrification of Hackney and East London, a piece of de - rather than re - generation.*
* Despite this - and illustrating the immense power of land value over everything else - the house is valued at £1m.
