Bunker by Bradley Garrett — a look at the world of preppers

When it became clear that coronavirus was going to drastically alter our way of life, thousands of preppers must have felt vindicated. Before the pandemic, anyone who confessed to being a prepper — those who prepare for catastrophe by building bunkers or saferooms and stockpiling food and water — faced ridicule. Not now.

Mercifully, the pandemic has not caused the kind of societal breakdown that many of the preppers in Bradley Garrett’s new book Bunker: Building for the End Times are readying themselves for. But who is to know how close we came.

If the mortality rate of Covid-19 were higher, or its effect on children a little worse, how many key workers — the delivery drivers, the supermarket staff, the nurses and doctors who kept society functioning — would still have turned up for work? There is a saying among preppers, Garrett writes: we are “seventy-two hours to animal”.

Back in 2012, Garrett caused a stir when he illegally scaled the Shard skyscraper in London while it was still under construction. The US academic and social geographer is interested in uncovering cities’ hidden spaces. He calls it “place-hacking”.

Heidi, a rare female voice in the blokey world of prepping, says she avoids TV and gets her news from YouTube. ‘You have got to find your own facts’

Garrett puts such skills to good use in Bunker: whether looking for a hidden complex in rural Tasmania, or a former munitions depot in South Dakota, he doesn’t always wait for permission to have a nose around. But the book is about much more than illicit glimpses into occluded spaces. It is a thoughtful study into the nature of paranoia and the people who try to profit from it — and it makes for a page-turning read.

For a start, there are some jaw-dropping statistics. The National Geographic in 2012 found that 40 per cent of Americans think stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter is a wiser investment than saving for retirement.

Garrett traces the history of prepping in the US to a speech given by President John F Kennedy in 1961, as the threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union escalated. “Our primary purpose is neither propaganda nor provocation — but preparation,” Kennedy said. It started the first “doom boom”, as Americans started building fallout shelters in their backyards. Garrett quotes the lurid language used in a 1962 Life magazine cover story. It described how, if a man was on Long Island facing a 20-megaton explosion in Manhattan, “the image of the fireball would burn holes right through the retinas of his eyes.”

These days, the threats that bunker builders are prepping for have multiplied. Alongside nuclear strike, there are fears of weapons that can knock out electronic equipment, terrorist attacks, climate change, financial collapse and, of course, the outbreak of a pandemic.

Some in the US also feel an existential threat posed by the Democratic party. A store owner in North Carolina tells Garrett he started prepping after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. “Liberal elites were ruining the country,” he says. Another prepper, Heidi, a rare female voice in the very blokey world of prepping, says she avoids TV and gets her news from YouTube. “You have got to find your own facts,” she says.

The Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize

Now in its eighth year, the FT and The Bodley Head, one of Britain’s leading publishers of non-fiction, team up to find the best young essay-writing talent from around the world. The competition has been the springboard for many writers; entries can be submitted at ft.com/bodley2020. It is open to anyone between 18 and 35 years of age.

The book is at its sharpest when dealing with the “dread merchants”, those who attempt to profit from the multi-billion-dollar industry that prepping has become. Garrett follows the media interest in super-luxury bunkers in New Zealand and the Czech Republic and finds little more than PR spin and CGI mock-ups. John Eckerd, the developer of an underground complex proposed in north Texas, received a prison sentence last year for money laundering. The luxury development, called Trident Lakes, touted its own golf course, sandy beaches and a 50ft-statue of Poseidon.

Ultimately, I think Garrett sees something optimistic in the desire to prepare for the apocalypse. It is the hope — sometimes religious — of being reborn in what preppers call the “after-time”. In the words of Robert Vicino, chief executive of Vivos Group, which is transforming a former US military facility in South Dakota into xPoint, a bunker network three-quarters the size of Manhattan: “No one wants to go into the bunker; they want to come out of the bunker.”

What they are met with when they do, though, no one can prepare for.

Bunker: Building for the End Times, by Bradley Garrett, Allen Lane RRP£20, 352 pages

Nathan Brooker is deputy editor of House & Home

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