The Man Who Found a Taste for Digging

William Lyttle listed his occupation as civil engineer, though no evidence exists that he was qualified or had ever worked as one. He arrived in London from Ireland in the mid-1960s, inherited a pair of Victorian terraced houses in Hackney, and knocked them into one.

Then he dug a wine cellar and found, as he put it, "a taste for the thing."

He kept digging for forty years. His tunnels ran in every direction, some stretching sixty feet, others reaching down to the water table. He reinforced them with whatever he could find — sections of cars, broken deep-freeze units, wooden beams, scavenged debris. He placed books in small alcoves carved into the tunnel walls, including At the Earth's Core. The clay he excavated had to go somewhere, so he dumped it in the rooms above, meaning that as his tunnels expanded downward, his house slowly filled with earth. He was trading living space for void space.

Neighbours noticed only when sinkholes opened in the pavement, a 450-volt cable was severed, and the local pub began worrying its cellar would drop into one of his excavations. The council evicted him, filled his tunnels with two thousand tonnes of concrete, and rehoused him on the top floor of a tower block.

To discourage tunnelling.

When Lyttle was found dead in his flat a few months later, he had knocked several holes in the walls and removed a large section between the kitchen and the living room.

He could not stop.