Once, getting ready for the apocalypse was for the paranoid. Now, in the face of cyber-attacks, climate breakdown and nuclear threats, the UK government recommends it. Should everyone have a survival kit?
This is a great time to be a shopkeeper, if that shop is for those worried about the breakdown of civilisation. “It started with Covid, and people weren’t looking for toilet rolls, put it that way,” says Justin Jones, who runs the online UK Prepping Shop, whose stock ranges from emergency food and wind-up radios to crossbows and body armour.
Business is booming, as is the British prepping scene – 22,700 members of the UK Preppers and Survivalists Facebook group, 6,000 in the UK Preppers Club Facebook group. The scene is not as well-known as its US and Canadian equivalents, but that’s partly by choice. “Preppers are by nature a little bit secretive,” says Bushra Shehzad, who is researching prepping for a PhD in marketing and consumer behaviour at Newcastle University.
“They are sceptical of people who aren’t part of it asking questions, which I think is because they’re portrayed in a manner that many of them don’t agree with.”
There are other differences from the North American scene, which you’ll pick up immediately when you watch Canadian Prepper’s 100 Things to Prepare for What’s Coming video on YouTube (“You’re probably a prepper if you do the following things …”). In the UK, private ownership of firearms is uncommon and highly restricted, so that cuts out a huge amount of what a US or Canadian prepper would think of as core activity – owning guns, cleaning them, learning how to use them, burying them in an outdoor cache. Plus,
“We don’t really have space to go off-grid in the UK,” says Leon (his name has been changed), who runs another prepping supply website. “So nobody is going to have a bug-out [secondary location or grab/go bag] fully stocked, to rendezvous with their loved ones.”
And yet the same geopolitical weather is hitting us all, and there are common themes haunting people and spiking sales of prepper products.
Read more: The Guardian