When the Hackney Mole Man died in June 2010, obituary writers struggled to wade through the surrounding overgrowth of half truths and bullshit. The verifiable facts were meagre: 79-year-old William Lyttle, no obvious next of kin, originally from an unspecified corner of Ireland, had died of “natural causes” in his flat on an east London council estate, where he had been living after a lengthy stint at a nearby hotel covered at considerable cost by Hackney Council.
In August 2006, the local authority had incited the curiosity of the international press by evicting Lyttle from his home of more than 40 years following a protracted legal battle. By then, the spectacular 20-room wreck at 121 Mortimer Road, De Beauvoir Town in Hackney had become something more than just a derelict house in a desirable corner of the capital. It had become a symbol, the meaning of which depended on one’s perspective. A monument to a freer, stranger London on the cusp of erasure. An outsider art project. Or simply a dangerous eyesore at risk of collapse.
Five years before Lyttle’s eviction, a jagged sinkhole had opened across the pavement outside the house. It revealed a sprawling network of tunnels, apparently decades in the construction, meticulously crafted with little more than a spade and homemade pulley. Their scale — 8m deep and 20m wide, supported by makeshift concrete pillars and featuring a maze of dead ends and a cluster of bizarre sculptures — inspired both terror and appalled admiration. Some were sure that Lyttle had dug far enough to penetrate the waterbed. “He’s fortunate a London bus is not in his front garden,” sniffed a council surveyor. “The property is dangerous and liable to flooding.” You wouldn’t be laughing, one local resident later told the assembled media, if it was your property imperilled. “The whole of the opposite street lost power one day after he tapped into a 450-volt cable.”
Others immediately understood the story’s potential. It seemed to have it all: a breathtaking feat of architectural self-mutilation combined with the whimsy of a modern fable. “It [instantly] became absorbed into the fabric of Hackney’s history,” Sean Gubbins, a walking-tour guide who has lived in the borough for almost half a century, told me. Central to this process was the spectre of Lyttle himself, a wild-haired, enigmatic anti-hero-cum-neighbour from hell. “Tunnelling is something that should be talked about without panicking,” he once offered, by way of explanation. In the intervening years, all manner of people, from artists and psychogeographers to heir hunters and debt collectors, have tried to get to the essential truth of the man. All have so far failed.
There is something apparently inexhaustible about our collective appetite for stories of tunnelling. In January, tens of millions of spectators across social media took delight in the news, and accompanying video footage, of a group of Hasidic Jews in New York who had illegally tunnelled deep under their Brooklyn synagogue before skirmishing with police. A senior rabbi denounced the tunnels to the BBC, declaring the community “pained by the vandalism of a group of young agitators”. Later that month, The New York Times ran a piece on the “TikTok tunnel girl”, a Virginia woman who had won considerable notoriety on the platform for her videos depicting her long, entirely unauthorised quest to build a cave under her suburban home, much to the chagrin of her neighbours and local bureaucrats. Naturally, the piece pays homage to the Hackney Mole Man.
The Mole Man’s origins are shrouded in mystery. William Lyttle most likely left Ireland for London in the mid-1960s after inheriting 121 Mortimer Road from his parents, figures who remain lost to the past. Most records list Lyttle’s occupation as civil engineer, though there’s no evidence to confirm he ever pursued the career in any conventional sense. Eyewitnesses have recalled a slightly shambling, if energetic, presence who became a fixture at local scrap yards and markets, invariably clad in a fisherman’s jumper and billowing beige trenchcoat.
The site was initially filled by two modest Victorian terraced houses, which Lyttle immediately set about smashing together: the beginnings of his epic programme of home improvements. If the tunnels were dug in silence, his above-ground tinkering was no secret. Within a couple of years, the new structure was subdivided into a cluster of unevenly designed bedsits, available at competitively low rents to anyone who came across the listing in the Evening Standard’s classified section. Over the next few years, hard-up students and artists would drift in and out of the miniature apartments, run by their rarely sighted live-in landlord.
The Hackney of Lyttle’s arrival is just about within living memory. A characterful slab of working-class inner east London pockmarked by casual dereliction and half-cleared demolition sites, and punctuated by the new 1960s high-rise estates. Lyttle’s arrival coincided with that of a wave of middle-class homebuyers, the lecturers, writers and teachers attracted by cheap Victorian housing stock and the promise of just about palatable inner city frisson.
Those days have passed. Today, Hackney is often used as an easy byword for rapacious gentrification. “It’s dominated by a certain tribe now,” said Gubbins. “That’s even the case for Homerton now,” he added almost disbelievingly. But De Beauvoir Town has always been an outlier: a relatively desirable enclave of grand villas and neat semi-detached houses located between Dalston and Haggerston, its land mostly owned by the Benyon family, a long line of shrewd, locally minded aristocrats.
I’d come across the Mole Man story in my early teens. I suppose I enjoyed it — like that of Edmund Trebus, the infamous north London hoarder who waged a years-long battle with Haringey Council before his eviction in the early 2000s — because it helped sate my appetite for the absurd. And I’ve long been drawn to stories of mystery and intrigue. The more apparently unsolvable the better.
The Mole Man saga always seemed to contain something aside from its headline strangeness: a captivating, slightly menacing ambiguity. Lyttle’s self-professed motivations could change with each telling. “I don’t mind the title of inventor,” he once told The Guardian. “Inventing things that don’t work is a brilliant thing, you know.” Rumours spread like heat. One blogger suggested that he could have been in a criminal gang. Others whispered about an estranged family back in Ireland, including a wife and daughter long ago abandoned to his obsessions.
It felt right to start with the lodgers. I’m not sure what I’d wanted from Justin Milne, a taciturn Scouser in his fifties who lived at 121 Mortimer Road in the spring of 1984. If not reverie, then perhaps mild enthusiasm. “A friend and I were retaking our second year at City of London Polytechnic. It’s called London Guildhall College now, I think,” he told me when we spoke on the phone. “We’d been living in Bethnal Green and needed to find somewhere cheaper. We saw a listing for the house. The rent was £50 a week. So we took it. It was a self-contained flat on the first floor.”
Milne’s landlord seemed to take delight in his own eccentricity. “He was kind of scruffy and unkempt, a bit elusive. You didn’t see him much. There were piles of rubbish and soil in the garden. The floor of our flat bounced when you walked on it. We didn’t think much of it. We were 20.” Milne and his friend only ended up staying a couple of months, until the end of the summer term. All things considered, he told me, it was probably the best place he’d lived during his brief years in the capital. Something about the area’s slightly neurotic faded grandeur had appealed to him. It had been sociable too, with a flat of girls above them and a young guy by himself on the ground floor. “There was a piano in our flat for some reason and we’d all have a go on it sometimes.”
News of Lyttle’s subterranean exploits reached Milne by chance in the late 2000s after he’d looked up his old address online following a mild bout of nostalgia. “It was a bit of a shock,” he said. “I’d had no idea he’d been building the tunnels. No inkling at all.”
Stuart McKenzie had also turned up with a friend at 121 Mortimer Road in the mid-1980s. The writer and illustrator was then an art student at Central Saint Martins. “We’d been living in Islington and needed a new place. There was nothing in any of the letting agents, so we picked up an Evening Standard. We spoke to this Irish guy on the phone and it all sounded a bit odd. But we went anyway.”
Neither McKenzie nor his friend had ever set foot in De Beauvoir Town. His recollections of the place have a surrealist tinge; Thatcher-years Hackney transmogrified into Lynchian fever dream. The mute locals they’d passed in the street who’d scorned their requests for directions. The battered front door answered by a mousy girl in her twenties, who introduced herself as the ground-floor tenant. “I’d like to say she was a ballerina,” he said. “She told us [Lyttle] dropped her post through a crack in the ceiling. She seemed perfectly happy, but I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this woman OK?’”
After a few awkward minutes, Lyttle arrived to give them a tour of the strange, sharply angled house. Their flat would be upstairs, past a freshly carved out alcove containing a microwave that could, he grudgingly offered, be used for baked potatoes. A battered metal railing separated the staircase from the door to the flat on the landing. “To stop fat people getting through. That’s what he told us,” McKenzie laughed. The viewing concluded with a brief, somewhat guarded visit to the back garden where piles of assorted junk sat amid mounds of freshly ploughed soil. “He told us he’d been digging for a while, that he was building some Jacuzzis.” Despite the very reasonable rent, McKenzie and his friend, both unnerved by the experience, decided against taking up residence.
Lyttle’s eventual eviction was a messy affair. It made it all the way to the High Court, with Hackney Council ultimately securing a victory. Not only was Lyttle turfed out of his fiefdom, he also had to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to cover the cost of stabilising the property.
Paul Lewis was a trainee journalist at The Guardian when a man in a beige trenchcoat barrelled into reception one afternoon in 2006. “He said he’d been evicted after burrowing under his house,” explained Lewis, now the newspaper’s head of investigations. “I asked if he’d take me there and hailed a black cab. It wasn’t until a few minutes into the journey that I thought, ‘Wait, could this be dodgy?’”
On arrival, they slipped through a hole in the recently installed fence, down into the Mole Man’s lair. “The truth is I was a complete coward. It could have been dangerous. He wanted to show me that the digging hadn’t reached anywhere outside his property, but I could see the tunnels.”
It’s funny, Lewis told me, that despite it all, the majority of those he spoke to for the news story he ended up writing about Lyttle were fond of their troublesome neighbour. “Nothing would stress you out more as a homeowner, but they were pretty jovial about it.” And what of Lewis’s impressions of the man himself? “He was engaged and energetic when we spoke. Quirky. I wouldn’t go further than that.”
The article Lewis wrote provoked an unexpectedly strong response. “It was an amusing story. Newspapers need them sometimes,” he said. “It can’t all be doom and gloom.” Still, the tale has stuck with him, as it has for so many others. “I don’t think even he knew why he’d done it,” he said.
In 2009’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, the great east London laureate Iain Sinclair devotes a chapter to his interpretation of the Mole Man. If in Lewis’s telling Lyttle was simply a local oddball, the protagonist of a light-hearted news story, Sinclair paints a darker, more romantic portrait. After his eviction, Lyttle took Sinclair — who is best known for his psychogeographic odysseys around the capital and its fringes — on a tour of the tunnels, deep down into the “dripping darkness”. It makes for a vivid set piece. The wild hair and flapping trenchcoat, the rough language. Even Lyttle’s “dignity” and “inner conviction” are, he writes, reminiscent of the Native American subjects of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Sinclair’s Lyttle offers up a few winning aphorisms. “Curiosity is my curse. If I make a start, I must know where it ends.” In the chapter, the reader is invited to partake in a kind of gentrification fable. The dreaded spectre of the Hackney Mole Man, haunter of middle-class anxiety dreams. As for Lyttle’s professed motivation, he told Sinclair, “I thought I’d try for a bit of a wine cellar and found a taste for the thing.” A line he had also given to Lewis.
Sinclair is not alone in his rendering of a picaresque Mole Man. The photographer Tom Hunter, who has lived in Hackney for 40 years, first bumped into Lyttle after a Vietnamese meal a few streets off Mortimer Road in the mid-2000s, shortly after Lyttle’s eviction. “I’d read about the story in the Hackney Gazette. It was a weekly event in the paper,” Hunter said. “We struck up a friendly conversation. He was quite an odd bloke. Super engaged and super distracted at the same time. A nervous energy. There was a hole in the fence he’d creep through to get back in the house.”
The two made a tentative plan to meet and take some portraits, but Lyttle proved impossible to pin down. Hunter’s resolve wasn’t blunted though. Instead, he eventually staged a “reconstructed” image using a model and stand-in lair. The resulting composition is undeniably striking. His Mole Man lies propped against a rock, as if defeated under the weight of his creation. “It became like a Greek myth to me. A man trying to drag us to Hades. When I give talks, I describe him as the Patron Saint of Hackney,” Hunter told me, with what I took to be a lingering awe. During Hunter’s years living in squats around the borough, he said, “We’d fix places up. And [Lyttle] did the opposite. It always seemed a form of creative destruction [to] me.”
Last November, I travelled to the Wellcome Collection in north London to meet Karen Russo. As we sat down in the café, I got the sense that the Israeli-born artist was slightly guarded. She had become interested in the Mole Man in 2006, when she was in her late-twenties, not long after Lyttle’s eviction. “I was living in Stoke Newington. For many years, I’d been obsessed with underground spaces. I was very much interested in German Romanticism and the relationship between the underground and the human psyche.” The challenge of working with “difficult” characters didn’t faze her. “I was working with prisoners at the time, making art. When I heard about William Lyttle, I was immediately drawn to the story.”
Russo posed me a question. Did I want the “romantic version” or did I want the truth of her fractious, months-long collaboration with Lyttle? The latter, of course. At first, she said, he had been flattered by the interest, if slightly wary after he’d had a bad experience with the makers of an aborted Channel 4 documentary. “He was quite shaken [by it], but it was hard to get him to talk about it. I’ve never been able to track down the footage. Maybe that’s part of the myth too,” she added.
Lyttle agreed to a series of filmed interviews. “He’d tell me all these weird stories [off camera], but we never got anywhere. They just kept going in circles.” It didn’t take long for her excitement to tip into frustration, as her biographical inquiries continued to be met with gibberish. Lyttle’s conversation soon became a stream of sexual innuendo and antisemitic insults. “He would ask endless questions about my sex life. Or it was ‘how come you have a small nose? Why do you have blue eyes?’” Even if Russo could tolerate the increasing invective, she began to feel there was no way she could subject a video editor to the same.
Her recollections offered a refreshingly grounded counterpoint to many of the other accounts I’d heard of the Mole Man. I had noticed, in my months of talking and thinking about him, how disarmingly easy it was to slip into considering Lyttle as an almost fictional character. Even his nickname, the “Mole Man”, sounds like something lifted from a spooky children’s book. But to Russo, Lyttle was not just an amusing eccentric; he was a flawed and troubled man.
When the two of them eventually began shooting the film, Lyttle suggested the abandoned Tube station at Aldgate East as their meeting point. The crisis was immediate. After a gruelling day of recording, Lyttle seized the tapes and jumped into a passing car, exhorting the astonished driver to take him to safety. “He split with the tapes. He saw them as a bargaining chip,” Russo laughed. “I wasn’t going to ‘negotiate with terrorists’.” The project’s impossibility had revealed itself. “I had to make a decision. And didn’t want to be extorted and manipulated. I just had to let go.”
Still, Russo did have the chance to descend into the tunnels. The resulting photos are all that physically remain of her encounters with Lyttle. They show several of his “sculptures” — a refrigerator baked into concrete, a rubble-strewn sofa covered in frayed electrical wiring — as well as a network of dead ends and staircases to nowhere. “There’s the obvious Freudian aspect of what he was doing,” Russo said. “But there was no ‘purpose’. It was a game of invention.”
A couple of months later, I travelled to the southern end of De Beauvoir Town, a few minutes’ walk from Haggerston station. It was a dull, grey Saturday morning and my well of contacts had begun to run dry as emails bounced back and texts went ignored. It felt like a bad omen when Sinclair declined an interview request. “I think I’ve had my say on the Mole Man,” he wrote over email. “And I don’t have anything fresh to offer. I agree that the story [holds] continuing fascination.”
Neither had my strategic Facebook posts in various Hackney local history and community groups yielded much. The time had come for a tactical shift. Rather than talking to people already on record, I would try to find those who had never spoken publicly on the subject of the Mole Man and might offer some fresh insight. The letters I’d printed that morning carried a simple message, along with my contact details. That I was a writer interested in Mole Man mythology and wanted to speak to as many locals as possible who might remember the saga. That I wanted to get beyond the minor cottage industry of speculation to interrogate the enduring obsession with the long-dead burrower.
Mortimer Road was quiet on approach save for two or three couples in their mid-thirties wrapped in expensive-looking, scrupulously neutral knitwear. Children squawked as they ran between the square’s manicured rose beds, parents in tow.
A pattern emerged as I walked down the street. For every three or four tastefully wooden-shuttered living rooms, there was roughly one net-curtained window: a possible clue to a long-term resident who might recall the Mole Man. Today, a three-bedroom house in De Beauvoir Town won’t see much change from £2mn. In 1998, that number sat at about £280,000. If not exactly bargain bucket, then at least within the realm of middle-class aspiration, even when adjusted for inflation.
After Lyttle’s death, 121 Mortimer Road faced an uncertain future. After “stabilising” the house using 2,000 tonnes of aerated concrete and removing 33 tonnes of detritus — including a boat and the rusted remains of three cars — Hackney Council retained temporary responsibility for its dilapidated shell until a beneficiary or buyer could be found to take on the £408,000 debt owed to the local authority. Police attempted to trace any surviving family without success, while a knock-off blue plaque appeared outside the house paying homage to the man who’d “lived and dug here”. Developers circled around the patch of increasingly prime real estate, though a bid to demolish the house and build a four-storey block of flats fell through after stiff local opposition.
When the house went to auction in the summer of 2012, competition was fierce. It eventually went for £1.2mn, sold to Sue Webster and Tim Noble, two post-YBA artists. Not only would the then married couple, who divorced in the mid-2010s, opt not to knock the house down, they’d also pay a form of homage by keeping its yellowing facade, as well as whatever else could be salvaged of Lyttle’s original work. “I love the way light falls here,” Noble later told Sinclair. Their chief rival bidder, television “heir hunter” Andrew Fraser, who claimed to be in touch with Lyttle’s “descendants”, didn’t respond to my multiple requests for interview.
The first replies to my hand-posted letters arrived in my email inbox later the same day. After a brisk back and forth, one respondent told me he’d be happy to meet the following weekend. In the meantime, I could find attached all that he knew about the Mole Man’s house: a small and well-tended trove of paraphernalia, from press clippings and estate-agent listings to historic planning permission applications and a local newsletter charting the property’s transformation. Bingo.
I met Paul Bolding, a retired journalist and keen amateur historian in his early seventies, at 11am the following Saturday at a busy, tolerably trendy café on Southgate Road, about 10 minutes walk from the Mole Man’s former residence. The choice of location was intentional, he explained. “The border with Islington is just over there,” he gestured out of the window before giving me a potted history of the Benyon Estate and its symbiotic relationship with De Beauvoir Town. “Edward Benyon took over [management of the estate] about 15 years ago with a brief to ‘bring the area up’. Not just housing. Places like this café. They’re very particular about who they rent to.”
Bolding has spent much of his adult life in Hackney. After living just off Mortimer Road for 40 years, he and his wife moved a couple of miles east across the borough in 2020. His love of Hackney’s history and often byzantine local politics is readily apparent. “The Mole Man stuff was always on and off. When the council took him to court. When he died. The legal process went on for years,” he said. “He’d been making promises to do the house up. Running rings around the council. It was in a terrible state. It got shabbier and shabbier.” Bolding’s own opinion of the Mole Man and his exploits was unclear to me, or maybe he simply didn’t feel strongly either way. To him, Lyttle was neither good nor bad exactly, but memorably odd. A colourful fragment of local history.
After finishing our coffees, he treated me to an impromptu walking tour of the area. We passed St Peter’s church, an act of 19th-century Benyon family beneficence, its unobtrusively “trendy vicar” installed a couple of years ago. Then on to an Edwardian warehouse now home to De Beauvoir Block, a collection of boutique creative businesses and co-working spaces (“Happy vibes only,” as its Instagram page puts it).
By the time we reached Mortimer Road, I’d still not figured out Bolding’s place in the Mole Man cosmology. He had his file of documents on the house, but he wasn’t an obvious custodian or advocate of the Mole Man myth: his real passion was for the history of the area itself. And he was far too discreet to offer up an opinion on the current iteration of 121 Mortimer Road, now inhabited by the artist Sue Webster. “Interesting.” That was his careful judgment as we stood a few metres from its artfully yellowing facade. Then we shook hands and went our separate ways. As I walked back to the station, a neat answer to the mystery was still outside my grasp.
Documenting the life of a man like Lyttle has its obvious narrative challenges and temptations. It’s easy to be prejudiced towards the colourful anecdote, the absurdist detail, the impossibly recalled snatch of conversation. Anything that might confirm the legend of a character defined by his eccentricities, that might live up to the full force of the Mole Man mythos — or allow me to get beyond it, to something approaching the truth. These intriguing scraps are all we have when it comes to a man who spent his life steadily dispensing with anything like familial bonds or ordinary friendship. Who seemingly devoted everything to his subterranean pursuits. Who is, after all, no longer around to give his ever-shifting side of the story. “People are asking you what the big secret is,” Lyttle told Lewis in The Guardian. “And you know what? There isn’t one.”
A few weeks later, I received an email that teased a fresh perspective. Margery Craig, now a psychotherapist in her sixties, had arrived at 121 Mortimer Road in 1979, not long after moving to London from her native Scotland. “Bill” Lyttle had been her eccentric landlord, she wrote, explaining that they’d stayed in touch on and off over the years, even as she’d moved across the borough. A friend had forwarded my message, though she’d deliberated hard before making contact. “A lot of what has been written . . . seems to be either ‘frenzy’ or making a myth, which has its place, but not one I could relate to.”
Like the other ex-tenants I’d spoken to, she’d come across Lyttle through a listing in the Evening Standard, she told me when we spoke the next day. “My flat was on the ground floor. You’d only ever speak to Bill at the door to his basement [flat] when it was time to pay the rent.” On the phone Craig seemed measured, cautious even, doling out her recollections with care.
The man she remembers was no recluse. Chatty enough, if unlikely to be at ease in a crowd. It’s true that his private life had always remained off limits. There had been talk of an ex-wife or girlfriend, though nothing concrete. “He told me he’d been a local councillor once. A Liberal, I think. I stayed for a year before my dad thought I should buy a place. This was when a flat in Hackney was still under 10 grand.”
Craig could lay claim to something matched by few others: if not intimacy exactly, then at least the seeds of a friendly, somewhat comprehensible social relationship with Lyttle. At this point, he was still just a local eccentric. This was many years before he was written about, before his reinvention as the Hackney Mole Man around 2006, when the Hackney Gazette is thought to have come up with the moniker. “He took me out for supper once at an Italian restaurant in Stoke Newington. There weren’t many in the area then,” she recalled. On handing in her notice, Lyttle had offered her the top-floor flat, in a “slightly ambiguous”, possibly romantic gesture. She politely declined. For years after, she’d occasionally bump into her old landlord as he made his rounds across the borough. Once, when accompanied by her then infant son, Lyttle had fixed her with a look of startling hostility. “I think he said ‘Oh, that’s another one ruined’ or something like that.”
When the Mole Man story broke, Craig followed it from a distance. The details were difficult to read. The house had meant everything to him and being separated from his life’s work would have been extremely painful for the man she’d known. “All the Mole Man stuff, I just couldn’t picture it. Of course, I didn’t know the extent of the digging. When I met him, he looked like a fisherman who’d just stepped off the boat . . . If you’d told me all he’d wanted was to dig a bit under the house out of curiosity, then I’d have believed it.”
I took it that Craig was still fond of her old landlord, or at least of the memories, the bygone time and place in her life that he represented. Her testimony had a different tone from that of most of the others I spoke to. For her, the story carried an unavoidable melancholy. “It was a grand project. He was resilient, [I can’t] imagine what people wrote bothered him. [But] it would have been awful for him to have been forced to leave.”
After my conversation with Craig, the legend of the Mole Man seemed reflected in a different light. On being placed in the high-rise flat where he was to spend his last year, Lyttle hadn’t been able to stop himself. According to several reports, he had gone back to his old ways, smashing through the dividing wall between the kitchen and living room. At first, I’d found this detail entertaining. Now, it seemed inescapably sad. Despite Lyttle’s well-remembered unpleasantness and patchwork of objectionable views, it would be difficult not to feel pity when confronted by a person so self-destructively consumed by their obsessions.
Perhaps the cultural fascination with the Mole Man has never entirely gone away because the mystery has never been solved. The possible interpretations are infinite, a kind of hall of mirrors. For Gubbins, the local historian and Hackney lifer, the Mole Man’s story captured a yearning for a place that was. “There was a time when one would expect things like that to happen here,” he sighed. “But not now. I can’t see it today.” His wistfulness made me wonder — not for the first time — what kind of afterlife the Mole Man saga would have had if his digging had occurred in Mitcham or Enfield, or any other London borough with a less glamorised history. The obsession with Lyttle reflects an obsession with Hackney itself. The sense that it is somehow different, special. A kind of Hackney exceptionalism.
But a hall of mirrors is also, of course, a dead end. Sometimes, as the Mole Man discovered, your shovel hits hard, impenetrable rock. Towards the end of our interview, Karen Russo spoke frankly. “People romanticise [Lyttle], but he was a deeply disturbed man who needed professional help. People tried to help him. But no one could.”
On a freezing Saturday morning, I sat drinking black coffee in Sue Webster’s sleekly minimalist kitchen in the reborn “Mole House” at 121 Mortimer Road. From my first visit to De Beauvoir Town, something told me that this was where my quest would end. After years of occasionally torturous renovations and eye-watering financial cost, the house was finally made habitable in the summer of 2018. “I was never worried about it,” she explained. “We were selling work, making money. As soon as we won the auction, I just thought ‘Oh great.’”
Webster, a wiry, dynamic woman in her mid-fifties, had first cycled past the house in the late-2000s at the peak of its dereliction. Having spent years living amid the relentlessness of Shoreditch, the relative gentility of De Beauvoir already held an appeal. “I had friends who lived around here. I always told them I wanted first refusal on their house, but when it came up I couldn’t do it. It was too normal.” But 121 Mortimer Road was different. “The roof had collapsed and there was this massive Keep Out sign. It looked like no one loved it, like a haunted house. It was brilliant. I phoned the number for Hackney Council on the sign. They told me to google the Mole Man.”
If most prospective buyers would have bolted on contact with the legend, Webster’s resolve had hardened. An ordinary ruin was one thing. A ruin with a “very difficult past, an incredible history” was quite another. Certainly, I could feel its weight as we spoke. Webster’s tour of the house took us past various new delights, from the grand skylight to artworks by friends Tracey Emin and Danny Fox. She gestured out of the window overlooking the end of Mortimer Road. Mirrored vinyl, she explained. So you could see out without anyone looking in.
Demolition was never an option. “I couldn’t see the point when you could save this amazing property.” The multimillion-pound salvage job is undeniably spectacular. And the Brits love few things more than a lovingly restored Victorian wreck, whatever the cost in strengthening its battered bones and joints, and however inevitable the creeping damp. Awards have flowed. Best Dwelling at the 2021 New London Awards, Best New Public Building (despite being a private house) at the 2020 Wallpaper Design Awards.
Few traces of Lyttle’s time remain, bar an old light switch he’d once sawn in half on the ground floor and a pair of his keys hanging on the wall, now somewhat resembling a “found art” sculpture. “I didn’t buy this building to make a Mole Man museum. It’s a functional property for me to live in, but of course I was attracted to the story,” Webster explained. Despite a few sceptics who have read her commitment to the property’s yellowing facade as a provocation, Webster told me the local response had been overwhelmingly positive. “A guy on the road shook my hand when I first had the builders in. He thanked me for saving the house.”
There are two entrances to her basement studio. One, via the upstairs living quarters, the other, via an external side entrance. There was no point in hiding my astonishment. The double height, white-walled studio had been built into Lyttle’s infamous subterranean lair. A five-metre-high wall displayed Webster’s latest work, “The Crime Scene”, a vast collage of her teenage possessions, from bootleg Siouxsie and the Banshees cassettes to Polaroids, gig tickets and battered Gordon Burn paperbacks. In the garden, I recognised one of the Lyttle’s concrete staircases to nowhere, now leading to a neat shrub-lined terrace. Try as I might, it was impossible to imagine the Mole Man toiling with his spade and pulley, digging ever deeper, protected by the cover of night.
Francisco Garcia is the author of “We All Go Into the Dark: the Hunt for Bible John”, published by Mudlark/HarperCollins
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