It’s great to be where it’s happening, before it actually is. The conversion of a tea warehouse into Shoreditch House members’ club, with swimming pool and cacophonous, monkey-house dining, brought numerous satellite galleries in its wake. High-end schmutter pits offered unticketed minimalist stock – two shirts, one cardigan – on naked tables for a business-class customs inspection. Lights were low-slung like a Victorian coffin warehouse: in a film. Bare bricks. Bulbs without shades. Investment coats swaggered from racks in the private changing rooms of performance artists. Males favoured tight trousers with highly polished brown shoes. And sculpted lumber-jack-fundamentalist beards. Young women channelled the fearsome disdain of Bond Street. Happening bars were brothel-scarlet like antechambers of hell. Boutiques were indistinguishable from galleries in the permanently skewed and tilting Redchurch Street opening night. There was a great fondness, now that sweated labour had suffered extraordinary rendition, for the word artisan. Cut-price denim from Cheshire Street stalls, by coming indoors, and migrating a hundred yards north, gained £500 on the price tag.
Sue Noble cycled past the Mole Man’s Hackney ruin and recognised the possibilities. A new obsession was born. The very clean interior of Adjaye’s Dirty House, white as the painted walls of the rectory Hole, was unreadable behind treated glass. Neighbourhood drug casualties and blank-eyed self-medicators, caught in the cracks of an ever-widening social and financial chasm, lurched up against the building like matchstick boats against a thunderous rock. The impenetrable surface, coated with a thick black wash, repelled all contact. Mirrored windows, some of them indented, were a display of negative prints reflecting spray-can panoramas from the opposite side of the street. By the magical repulsion of money, they stayed clear of defacement.
Webster had a vision. The roof of the Mole Man’s house had fallen in, bringing down all the floors. She would construct a three-storey home with the infamous basement as a studio. Whatever could be preserved of the tunnels would remain as quotations, gingivitic molars from a spooky London past teased into the bright light of the now.
I waited where I had mooched so many times, at the perimeter of the Mole Man’s house. Sue Webster agreed to give me a tour of her property. She arrived on the button: a slim, brisk woman on a slim-wheeled bicycle. She wore her fame lightly with an aura of post-punk, think it/do it realism. We slipped through a magic door and were soon ducking under scaffolding and jumping from ledge to ledge above the pit in which a team of builders laboured, clearing tunnels, securing foundations. A solid slab of concrete had been laid over the water table. William Lyttle couldn’t go down any deeper beneath his basement, so he branched off in every direction. He had a relish for en suite fittings, toilets hidden in cheese cupboards, rat holes equipped with broken basins and light switches cut in half. He imagined his hidden kingdom as an underground Piranesi prison for lodgers.
The half-completed passages and perpetual burrowing reminded me of the fractal architecture of the Elizabethan palace contrived by Michael Moorcock for his Spenserian 1978 novel, Gloriana, or The Unfulfill’d Queen. Moorcock, in his turn, was paying his respects to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Being outside the literary mainstream, and seeing the spread of the city as just a single draft for a multitude of parallel universes, stimulated the urge to invent secret spaces behind mirrors, behind walls heavy with velvet drapes and faded portraits. ‘There we find corridors within corridors, like conduits in a tunnel, houses within rooms, those rooms within castles, those castles within artificial caverns.’ Moorcock knew how to wait for the past to come round again. That smell of sodden wood pulp and dry rot in the latest loft conversion.
I traded information with Webster; we were both collectors of unreliable Mole Man anecdotes. I mentioned Karen Russo’s experiences and the sour sexual monologues that bubbled up, incontinently, from mephitic depths. Webster told me that her builders had not unearthed any biscuit tins of banknotes, but they had discovered caches of pornography, specialist magazines featuring very large ladies. Mr Lyttle buried his own fertility figures, tubers encased in white fat, Willendorf Venuses splayed in chemical colour on water-damaged stock, reeking of semen.
I said how I’d heard that the Mole Man had inherited the property from his parents and that he’d lived there with wife and daughter, until they walked away. Then he took in lodgers, but they proved too much of an imposition when he began digging. Webster pointed out the traces still visible, like spectral imprints in the cast of Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 ‘House’ in Bow, of the tabloid newspapers with which Mr Lyttle improved the walls of tenants who wanted an upgrade to ameliorate the damp.
It was thought that the reluctant landlord had once worked as an electrical engineer. He did all his own wiring and plumbing. The aborted caverns, tunnel entrances with supporting columns, had a fungoid charm Webster associated with Antoni Gaudí and his unfinished Sagrada Família in Barcelona.
The Mole Man’s great work, like a story by Kafka, could never be finished. But Tim Noble and Sue Webster, as his elective heirs, would honour the heritage. The assault on the subsoil of Mortimer Road was a neurotic scrabble, a butting and gnawing at earth that poulticed the haunted prose of Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’.‘So I must thread the tormenting complications of this labyrinth physically as well as mentally… and I am both exasperated and touched when, as sometimes happens, I lose myself for a moment in my own maze, and the work of my hands seems to be still doing its best to prove its sufficiency to me, its maker, whose final judgement has long since been passed on it.’
Kafka’s mole-creature hears terrible noises. There are other things in his tunnels. New occupiers are coming. ‘Yet if these creatures are strangers, why is it that I never see any of them? I have already dug a host of trenches, hoping to catch one of them, but I can find not a single one.’ Mr Lyttle’s excavations are an MRI scan of paranoia constructed to hold off the predatory owners he senses on the horizon. To hold off rival artists. To hold off the future itself. And the investors who will invest in the residue of his madness. And the writers who will exploit his legend.
Tim Noble joined us, another slim-wheeled bicycle to padlock. His hair, once as inky black as that of his collaborator and former wife (they were married by Tracey Emin on a Thames boat), is now bottle blond like a hitman from a Barry Gifford story. The couple got their start in East London as factory assistants to Gilbert and George in Fournier Street. They laboured on the ground floor, while the celebrity conceptualists took their ease upstairs, reading the Telegraph. ‘But they were always very prompt in paying their invoices.’
You can see how well it went for Tim and Sue. They are one of those hardworking, faux-slacker, pretend-dangerous couples doing their spiky best to look menacing. They love the fabric of what they have acquired. They admire Mr Lyttle’s DIY expertise and the way he made moulded pillars carry a load. The persistent lung-teasing stench of brick dust and albino mushrooms, drains and drowned leather, carries an aphrodisiac hit that takes the artists back to their first date: a visit to the house of Fred West, the Gloucester serial killer. West was another builder and bodger. Tim Noble remembered the way that a side return had been roofed over, using a tree for a supporting column. The house of horror in Cromwell Street was demolished, reduced to dust, made into a landscaped footpath. And now Noble explained how, once the cage of scaffolding had been removed, they wanted to retain the Mole Man’s historic façade, so that the house appeared to outsiders as a ruin lost in time, while behind the untouched and peeling sour-cream paint, the sticky-gravy window frames of ugly coal-smoke London, an uncluttered contemporary home would be created. ‘I love the way light falls here,’ Noble says.
***
After we parted, and intoxicated by my tour of the site, the burrows and ledges and lumps that confused all previously established notions of scale, of what constitutes inside and outside, I decided to return home to finish reading the book I’d extracted from the narrowboat moored beside Cat and Mutton bridge, at the end of Broadway
Market: Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England. The towpath, a fraught negotiation with cyclists, joggers, carts like supermarket trolleys stacked with small children to be delivered to schools and nurseries, had become a dormitory for those who preferred not to join the property ladder.
The morning smell of woodsmoke is enticing. Freelance operations of the kind that once found room in Portobello Road or Camden Passage have transferred to the canal. They sell tea and homemade cakes, knitted hats, haircuts, yoga and Tarot readings. Word on the Water, a book-barge based at Paddington Basin, sometimes chugs downstream to Camden Lock and Hackney. The Paddington mooring is threatened by demands for yet another quintessential coffee franchise, in keeping with the speedy buzz of the development. The book business, started by a man who spent twenty years helping to rehabilitate former addicts, and a partner with a shop at Archway, caught the eye of sympathetic journalists by displaying a full complement of shipboard cats and open boxes of Beatrix Potter. The floating bibliothèque drifted for a time, up and down the River Lea, until the bookmen were wearied by threats of fines from the Canal and River Trust. Stewart Lee came aboard to record a message of support. ‘This is a land grab,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure what of: the air between the edge of the boat and the quay?’ It is all a question, he concluded, of making a case for eccentrics, of what we decide to value in our culture.
As a former professional in the scavenging trade, a Merz collector (school of Kurt Schwitters), I went through the narrowboat stock in about two minutes. Harmless reading fodder in paperback ranks. Glossy art books, slightly weathered. Then there was Land Under England, a first edition from 1935, in pristine yellow Gollancz jacket. The title sat nicely with my current preoccupations.
O’Neill was Permanent Secretary to the Department of Education in the Irish Free State, and an occasional, but always interesting novelist. The cover copy describes Land Under England as ‘a work of genius’. And goes on to say that ‘on the spiritual plane it is a book of the most profound significance for our time’. Æ, the Dublin poet and mystic, glosses the novel as a political satire against totalitarianism and the insidious seductions of dictatorship. ‘The highest form satire can take is to assume the apotheosis of the policy satirised and make our shuddering humanity recoil from the spectacle of its own ideals.’
At the period when Land Under England was written, the glamour of fascism touched Æ’s friend and associate, WB Yeats, who pledged his support for Eoin O’Duffy’s militaristic Blueshirts. Francis Stuart, a self-condemned Irish Dostoevsky, who was also published by Gollancz in the 1930s, had a special gift for putting himself on the wrong side of every political argument. He took off for wartime Berlin, where he made broadcasts, and dreamed of heading further east into the firestorm of Russia.
O’Neill’s subterranean fantasy absorbs these currents. Finding a copy in contemporary Hackney, smuggled in by water, feels like recovering a message rescued from a bottle washed ashore after almost eighty years, at a period when the entire city, from politicians, corporate entities and property speculators, to psychogeological artists, is digging. Going under. Ripping up the surface. Hacking out pits and shafts in a demented bid to turn the world on its head and to colonise the land under London.
The conceit of O’Neill’s novel is that a decayed gentleman with an inherited pile, up north, returns from the First War with nothing left except his high-Tory passion for the classics, for Latin, for the values of the Roman imperium. He tramps Hadrian’s Wall, poking into every cranny, tapping at stones like Tony Robinson and his hyperventilating TV archaeologists. Until, one day, he succeeds, and vanishes somewhere beneath the ground. His son, in a lather of Oedipal conflicts, follows him down.
The technical aspect of the descent is overwhelmed by the Miltonic conviction of O’Neill’s eschatology, a terrifying slither across dust and pumice to a dead inland sea. Descendents of the Roman legions, minds sucked to an affectless conformity, work at their tasks, controlled by Masters of Knowledge. They are like so many shareddesk digital zombies, all individuality leeched into some flickering universal screen in a Shoreditch container.
‘I saw that I was the only human being left in that world outside that machine,’ O’Neill wrote. ‘Under that dome, which was the land of England, I must make a stand for humanity.’
The insanity of attempting to impose a limited version of history, an apology for conquerors and occupiers, while burning the brains of token resisters, incubates the threat of future war. ‘The danger would be greater because nobody could suspect that, under the green earth of England, an outcast offspring of its own people… was gathering itself for a spring into the upper world again, under the urge of a madman who combined the evil of the light and the darkness.’
I came home to find a piece of paper on my doormat.
Dear Sir/Madam. You are receiving this letter because your property or business is located within 200 metres of land that may be needed in the future to build the proposed Crossrail 2 underground rail line.
We lived, so it appeared, in ‘an area of surface interest’. If the shadow of the Crossrail pit queered any potential property sale, we were free to make a claim for ‘statutory blight’. I thought of the actual blight of the enclosure of Finsbury Circus, an oasis among the towers of the City, sacrificed to the impossible ideal of smoother, faster transit for workers at the financial hub.
We had come full circle. Forty-five years ago, we moved into a terraced Victorian house with outside lavatory and tin bath, under threat of demolition, when the towers of the Holly Street estate marched south. The previous owners were emigrating to the liberties of forest-fringe Essex. The terrace survived and became, in the course of time, part of a conservation area.
Given the struggles of present day artists, inspired to dig holes in rectory lawns, or to excavate wartime bunkers, we were fortunate. London moves on. It always does. But this time it felt different. That invisible cockpit of pollution, rising from the loop of the M25, the orbital motorway, had closed against the rest of England. London was now an island, open for business only if your business is business.
Coming off the canal, up the ramp to Queensbridge Road, I was barged aside by a man on the run, ranting into the air, balancing his phone out in front of him like a very small tray of slippery cocktail sausages. ‘I bought 2,000 bottles of poppers, thinking the price would be incredible when they were made illegal. I speculated. I took a legitimate punt. Post-Brexit I am always angry.’
OVERGROUND SOUNDSCRAPE
While an unreported war raged in tunnels under the parks, the lost market gardens and brick kilns of Haggerston, an approved future was made visible in the form of the London Overground railway, an elevated circuit familiarly known as ‘The Ginger Line’.You could see it and hear it (and smell the burnt air too), if you lived within the right set of real-estate contours. Much of the time – weekends excepted, sections closed for perpetual Crossrail improvements – the Overground worked. And worked well. It linked Haggerston with Denmark Hill, Willesden Junction with Canonbury: a single self-sufficient railway doughnut rising above the status of less fortunate neighbours. Think of the Overground as one of London’s transmuted Olympic rings.
I spent months walking the loop, watching the transformation of spaces under the tracks, oily caves metastasised into coffee outlets and exercise boutiques. The high fences around development sites, brilliant with predictions, told me just how many minutes it would cost to arrive at a more desirable place, a better class of station.
The sound of the railway was a lingering sigh, shivering the bikerack balconies of new-build flats. A gentle, life-affirming zephyr summoned those agitated walkers, who are always late, app-informed that the only train (for the next three minutes) is about to depart for Highbury & Islington.
Certain specialised beggars, inflictors of unsolicited magazines and peel-off chemical sachets, staked out the fringes. Mounds of free newspapers, with bulging property supplements, were distributed at key stations: Whit
echapel, Shoreditch, Dalston Junction, Hackney Central. Haggerston qualified for the morning Metro, but not for the London Evening Standard. Paper handlers, sidesmen for some discontinued parish church, lurked at the station entrance passing out folded newspapers like prayer books. Always with a smile, a courteous nod of acknowledgment for regular parishioners.
A fit young black man, like a personal trainer from the gym in the railway arch on Stean Street, squatted into his dominant position on the pavement right outside Haggerston station. There was no way around him.
SPARECHANGEFORFOODPLEASE.
SPARECHANGEFORFOODPLEASE.
SPARECHANGEFORFOODPLEASE.
No variation in pitch or emphasis. SPARECHANGEFORFOODPLEASE. More of a mantra than a practical demand. SPARECHANGEFORFOODPLEASE.
Later in the morning, there is a transitional phase when this man shares the pavement with a barista coffee cart offering rush hits before a run at the barriers and the stairs. Then he’s gone. But his chant stays in my head, accompanied by weary sighs from Overground trains, hitting the brakes before climax, before peaking again at Hoxton.
SPARECHANGEFORFOODPLEASE.
Follow the railway, follow the beggars. Under the bridge, emerging from Shoreditch station, there are substantial holdings of pavement polishers, flattened cardboard mattresses. Rough-sleepers endure the din of street musicians and crews of spray-can professionals. And the crusty droppings of pigeons dodging their spikes.
There are not many beggars working the trains. One Dubliner tried her luck. A small woman in ripped tartan trousers. ‘I don’t want to impose now. Can anyone help with a few pennies?’ Women respond more generously than men wedded to their screens. But they are relieved to see her move on. ‘I don’t want to impose…’
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