Is digging a tunnel under your house the perfect life escape? | Eva Wiseman

There are places you return to in your dreams, a great aunt's cottage or the elementary school canteen, repurposed by your subconscious as places to flirt, horror or something dental. Ever since I first heard of it in the early 2000s when I lived down the street, one of mine was the mole man's house.

It was William Lyttle, a civil engineer who liked to dig. At his home in Hackney, he dug and dug, digging and nibbling in the dirt, digging a network of tunnels and caves, some 26 feet deep, some hanging or strewn with objects, like bathtubs, old lights and televisions. There was also a boat there, and the wreckage of three Renault 4 cars.

In 2006, when Lyttle was 75 and over 40 in his excavations , the warden reported being kicked out of his own home because (said a city surveyor, ominously), “there was movement in the ground.” Lyttle said he was just doing "home improvements" and "I thought I'd try a little wine cellar and found the taste of the thing." Besides, "the tunnel is something to talk about without panicking."

He spoke in what is now recognized as the language of the real estate developer or oligarch, whose houses are only finished once their builders have reached the water table. At the time, however, Lyttle was moved to a top-floor apartment to avoid more tunnels. He died there in 2010, but not before digging through the brick wall and becoming something of a popular anti-hero to many.

I was on vacation in France last week, where I sat in the shade and saw the opening of City in Nevada, a monumental piece of land art over a mile and a half long, which took Michael Heizer 50 years to complete in sand and cement. In this heat and in my mood, the weight of a lifelong project of this magnitude was oppressive and darkly magical. I was staying near the Ideal Palace, a castle built at the beginning of the 20th century by Joseph Cheval, a postman, from pebbles he collected during his rounds.

Good that Cheval's neighbors We thought he was crazy at the time, his children now live off his heritage: his abstract architecture is a national monument. This is not the case with the house of the mole-man. Hackney City Council filled the tunnels with concrete and left it derelict for years until, at an auction in 2012, it was bought by artist Sue Webster. When I posted my Mole Man dreams on Instagram this weekend, Webster invited me to tea. I got on the bus.

As I walked, I wondered what was in this story that made it so obsessive. Is it just the mystery? The idea that there was something out there that Lyttle was looking for? A psychiatrist has said that digging a tunnel can be interpreted as 'a desire to return to the safety of the mother's womb' and yes there is the image of him scratching at the earth as if stepping back in time, a restless quest.

Walking through the modern glamor of De Beauvoir in the summer, I saw palisades behind which basement excavations were in progress, and a half -thought of social cleansing and the boundaries of a house crossed my mind. But as I walked through the rusty green gate and Webster waved at me, I realized that my obsession, today anyway, is rooted in how artists continue to create things that don't nothing, or digging nowhere, simply because that's what they have to do and they have no choice but to.

De Outside, the house looks remarkably like it did in Lyttle's day. Together with architect David Adjaye, Webster has attempted to restore as much of it as possible - steps end abruptly in the air, concrete made of stones and pipes jut out through the ruins. Inside, however, is a vast open space of wood and concrete designed precisely to meet Webster's needs: a large bed, a large studio, with a wall high enough to contain his current work, a "stage of crime" of his life. Yet after five years of costly renovations, it is...