Parisian sewers, old gold mines and the Mole Man of Hackney in a thrilling celebration of the subterranean When I was a child, around the corner from my home in east London lived a man named William Lyttle. For decades Lyttle had been digging a series of tunnels underneath his house. His activities had made him something of a local celebrity, nicknamed “the Mole Man of Hackney”, but when one of his tunnels collapsed, causing a huge crater to form in the street outside his house, the council evicted him and filled in his excavations with concrete. He lived out the last few years of his life far above the ground in a high-rise block. The Mole Man of Hackney, Will Hunt argues in his winningly obsessive history of our relationship with underground places, might best be understood as an evolutionary throwback. As a species, he says, humankind has always been fascinated with what lies beneath the surface of the world. This obsession had practical origins – we descended underground to mine precious minerals, or to seek protection from enemies and predators – but it also served more spiritual purposes. The ancient Greeks went into caves in search of visions and wisdom. At Lascaux and Chauvet the Magdalenians, sophisticated pre-modern peoples who lived in western Europe during the Palaeolithic era, drew extraordinary pictures on their walls. Continue reading...
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