Should we all be prepping for the end of days?

In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody believed Noah until it was way too late. Bunker: Building for the End Times, a hybrid of reportage and philosophical musing, considers contemporary survivalist culture in all its manifest craziness, from the doomsday realtors who sell bomb-proof, virus-free bunker space to the Bible-belt survivalists who pack their INCH bags (I’m Never Coming Home) and bug out to bunker encampments in Wyoming in anticipation of the Final Judgment. In the modern concrete bunker Bradley Garrett sees an extreme expression of our fear of nuclear, chemical, biological and climatic calamity. Never before in recorded history, he tells us, ‘has humankind faced such grave, and myriad, existential threats’ as it does today.

Garrett, an American self-styled ‘experimental geographer’ and ‘elder millennial’ (he was born in 1981), has been here before. Over the years in London he has explored off-grid subterranean sites (disused Tube stations, fallout shelters) and was briefly notorious in 2012 for scaling the Shard before it opened. As part of his ‘place-hacking’ feats he fathomed a 35-acre underground bunker in Wiltshire, built in the late 1950s complete with 60 miles of roads, sleeping quarters and a drinking reservoir. The notes he took on this ‘secret’ city complex (situated beneath RAF Corsham) provided the catalyst for this new book.

People who prepare for the end times are known collectively as ‘preppers’. An estimated 1 per cent of the United States population, or 3.7 million people, self-identify as preppers. The bunker crowd is far from uniform, though. Evangelical Christians, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Bitcoin millionaires, conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs, libertarians and hucksters of one stripe or another have invested in varieties of backyard hidey-holes in order to ride out the coming apocalypse.