Mole House in London
- Jakob Schoof
It is quite normal for single-family houses to say something about their occupants. Rarely, however, do the residents reveal their inclinations to such a degree as William Lyttle, a civil engineer who became known as “the Mole Man of Hackney”. For more than 40 years, he lived in his spacious London house and created a ramified network of tunnels beneath it. After his death in 2010, the local building authorities had these burrowings filled with 2,000 tonnes of lightweight concrete because the stability of the neighbouring structures had also been endangered. Years later, when the artist Sue Webster became interested in the property, it was an uninhabitable ruin on an acutely angled site, reminiscent more of the excavations in Pompeii than of a garden.
