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[theweaselking]

After 40 years' burrowing, Mole Man of Hackney is ordered to stop

From the outside, the house that stands at 121 Mortimer Road in Hackney, east London, looks no different to the thousands of other decrepit old buildings scattered across the country. The roof has caved in. Three of the windows are boarded up and cracked paint peels from the wrinkled walls.

But this is no ordinary house. Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle's house stretch. But according to the council, which 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.

Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property.

No one in the community, even those who remember when Mr Lyttle first purchased the house in the 1960s, can answer the question on everyone's lips: why does he do it? In all his years of digging, though, Mr Lyttle has never offered a straight answer.

"I don't mind the title of inventor," he said. "Inventing things that don't work is a brilliant thing, you know. People are asking you what the big secret is. And you know what? There isn't one."

Comments

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

This sounds kind of like my ex-bandmates' former next door neighbor. He hoarded weird shit like milk cartons and plastic bags, boarded up all his own windows, and had this obsession with painting things yellow, including the curb, several rocks in his front yard, and the utility pole across the street.

One day he wandered off, was found in a fast food restaurant bathroom several miles from his house, and wound up institutionalized. The house had had no power or running water for quite some time and was in such poor condition that it had to be condemned.