Encounters with the doomsters who are preparing for the coming apocalypse.
I’m on the edge of Builth Wells, a historic spa town in South Wales by the River Wye, known for the annual arrival of antiques and livestock; it also has a nightclub called Dazzlarz and two separate shops named Beautifully Bonkers. Leigh Price, who has a gnomic turn of phrase and vigilant blue eyes, is showing me around his store, The Bug Out. He brings me to a display of MREs, or ‘meals ready to eat’. Among the liquefied green pouches is a packet of chocolate pudding that could be edible for another 20 years. Is it nice? ‘It’s alright,’ he says, with not much conviction. He lifts and shakes another bestseller: a large tin of freeze-dried chicken fajita and rice. Not long after Price opened the place four years ago, one of his sons peered inside – perhaps noting the army surplus gear, bushcraft knives and gas masks – and said, ‘If there was a zombie apocalypse, this is where I’d want to go.’
Many of Price’s customers already imagine a similarly undesirable fate coming down the pipe. The Bug Out is a prepper shop, one of a growing number in the UK selling survival equipment that opened during COVID. Price is eager to frame prepping as a practical, of-course-you-would pursuit. ‘Prepping is an insurance policy, right?’ he says, standing by a shelf of suede boots. ‘You insure your car against accidents, you insure your house against fire; you gotta look at prepping as insurance on life. If something happens, some sort of emergency, you’re insured, you’ve got supplies, skills, knowledge, kit.’
Price, a stolid pragmatist down to his olive Crocs, would be a useful person to know if, one day, the shit hits the fan (or SHTF, in the standard-issue prepper argot). In a post-pandemic world, fewer people are sure that it won’t. One tell for this is the spread of prepping in culturally distant provinces. Silicon Valley. Guardian columns. Mumsnet. On a Friday night in March, I was at a music industry do, chatting about this piece, when a writer I’d met only moments earlier sheepishly mentioned that he’d been building a shockproof larder of tins and pastas for years, and brought up a big-room tech house DJ who’d erected a barn for the same purpose. In recent months, several European governments have said that packing a ‘go bag’ and stockpiling essentials might not be such a bad idea (the UK did the same last year).
If preppers are inclined to treat official advice with contempt, the rest of the country is starting to feel the same. A 2024 report lays bare the degree of ill-feeling among the British public towards our leaders; among OECD countries, only the Slovakian and Czech governments are less trusted than the UK’s. Nearly a year into power, Labour is struggling to inspire optimism. It can’t do much about running trains or taps properly, has tied itself in Gordian knots over growth, and doesn’t have a bed to spare in hospitals or prisons. Though it often blames the Tories for Britain’s malaise, Keir Starmer’s government seems powerless to fix it.
Stigmas around prepping persist. In the public imagination, preppers are camo-loving, bullet-counting Pizzagaters, a few plasters short of a first-aid kit. The quintessentially red-state American stereotype has its roots in the figure of Robert DePugh, who in 1961 founded the Minutemen, a commie-hating anti-government militia. Considered the godfather of American survivalism, DePugh combined paramilitary knowhow with sinister warnings for crypto-socialists, not least in his monthly rag, On Target. ‘Traitors beware,’ declared one issue, describing milkmen, mechanics and other ordinary-looking ‘patriots’ who’d learned how to wield ‘the slow knife, the strangler’s cord’.
In the UK, COVID has aroused a dark awakening of anti-vaxxers, blade runners, climate sceptics and 5G arsonists. However diffuse their politics, these loosely affiliated cells have common cause against weather controllers and net-zero zealots, among others, in the arena of what the writer Peter Guest has called ‘the bullshit cinematic universe’.
The paranoid style is taking hold in Westminster, too. One Tory MP compared the side effects of COVID jabs to the ‘biggest crime since the Holocaust’. There’s Liz Truss, whingeing about the ‘deep state’ on her Florida safaris. And the Conservatives aren’t the only ones at it: a Labour by-election candidate was recorded saying that the Israelis knew about and ‘allowed’ 7 October to happen.
Conspiracy theorising among elected officials extends even to dull town planning models like the 15-minute city, a freedom-thieving ‘international socialist concept’, the Tory MP Nick Fletcher told the House of Commons, to disbelieving laughter. Less amusing, though, is research by King’s College London that points out that 33% of the public agrees with Fletcher on this and a range of other secret plots to turn Britain into a walkable dystopia.
Preppers are far from uniquely conspiratorial. The Great Reset may be no less credible to your yoga teacher. And platforms like YouTube and Facebook, where many preppers hang out, are rigged – so to speak – to amplify ragebait. Still, I’m surprised to find a real-world font of misinformation in Price’s shop: there are copies of The Light, a self-described ‘truthpaper’, stacked over water filtration boxes. ‘Customers bring them in,’ Price says. ‘I don’t do much reading myself.’ The headlines are lurid enough (Slave new world!), but when Price lets rip about central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), the shop’s halogen lights seem to emit a harsher glow.
‘These digital currencies are programmed so they can determine what you buy, what you can buy, where you can buy it,’ he says, expressing an anxiety that has become a nationwide carnival of its own. (Privacy campaigners have been similarly critical of CBDCs, and in a 2022 speech, the then-head of GCHQ said that China’s digital yuan could be used to monitor citizens.) ‘They’re already trying to get rid of cash now, right? They want to get the cashless society up and running. You’ll see that everywhere you go. ‘Oh, we don’t take cash anymore because of COVID.’ I’ve taken the kids to well-renowned holiday places in the UK – totally cashless. Cash is the last bastion of a free man.’
Dave Hurt, a mixed-martial arts instructor in his 50s, describes himself as a ‘black sheep’ in the prepper community. ‘I’m more into old-school ways, old-school equipment,’ he says. On YouTube and TikTok, Hurt reviews survival products, teaches self-defence and explores abandoned tunnels. It is light, however, on the conspiracy clickbait you often find from preppers, especially in North America, with large online followings.
‘There’s one really big channel’ – he means FunkyPrepper, whose 138,000 subscribers make him the UK’s largest prepping YouTuber – ‘I didn’t particularly like his content. Everything he said was, “We’re gonna die tomorrow, COVID jabs are killing everyone, World War Three is coming.” Boom, boom, boom. Fear, fear, fear. And not a lot of facts at all. He’s not even giving statistics. He came offline, I’m not sure if he got arrested.’
One October morning last year, FunkyPrepper, real name Darren Brown, opened the door of his home in rural Wales to a dozen counterterrorism officers. As they confiscated his phone, laptop, SD cards, hard drives, knives and air rifles, they told Brown that one of his Instagram posts – a clip linked to the proscribed neo-Nazi group National Action – had triggered his arrest. He was released after questioning, but not without punishment – he was banned from social media for four months. As he explained his absence to subscribers, Brown played down his knowledge of National Action, and said he’d deleted the offending post after 24 hours, anyway, because ‘no one was watching it’.
Price tells me he’d employed Brown at The Bug Out for a year, but it hadn’t worked out. ‘His heart’s in the right place,’ he says, ‘but when he left this job, he said, “I’m going on YouTube full-time.” So he was trying to get as many views as possible, for the revenue.’ Between the Gadsden ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags and the imminent threat of ‘global Islamic takeover’, it was clear that Brown’s channel would, as Price put it, ‘bite him in the bum’. Since returning from the wilderness, Brown has sworn off talking about what he calls ‘the migrant situation’. If the ban had been tantamount to a kind of personal apocalypse, it was, you could say, one of the few doomsday scenarios that had caught him by surprise. (Brown didn’t respond to my emails.)
Before Tom Blakey started his own YouTube channel, Prepared Pathfinder, he was ‘looking for information’ about preparedness on the platform. ‘Anyone in the States, all they’re talking about is guns, ammo and med kit,’ he says. ‘Nothing to do with keeping warm or dry, or shelter. And when I watched UK preppers… it just seemed to be full of people that didn’t really have any experience.’ (Like Price, Blakey is ex-military, and his channel is also assiduously apolitical.) ‘It didn’t convince me at all,’ he adds, ‘I felt like I needed to represent the UK, and, without sounding big-headed, just give it a little bit of credibility.’
After watching Blakey’s videos, it’s easy to imagine him succeeding. And in the numerous UK forums I scroll through, plenty of preppers would rather talk about solar panels than the World Economic Forum. But I wonder if some will simply prefer, as a matter of taste, the narrative power of a story that pits hardbitten truth-seekers against a cabal of lizards in Davos. Similarly, the militia folklore of US prepping is possibly more seductive than a meek tea-towel appeal to Keep Calm and Carry On.
Price sees this firsthand in The Bug Out; some visitors fixate on the crossbows and other Rambo accessories. ‘I say, “What do you think you need that for?” As a shop you try to sell as much as you can. But I’m more thinking, right, “What do you actually need?” Then I give them a step-by-step guide.’
What about the truly useful stuff in the shop, that customers rarely seek out? ‘The main thing would be a book – on, say, survival or first aid. I always say about a book, the batteries never run out on that.’ On a shelf by the counter is a neat row of paperbacks on bushcraft, foraging and beekeeping – skills I know embarrassingly little about.
‘This is the go-to book: Lofty Wiseman’s SAS Survival Guide,’ says Price. ‘It covers everything.’
I’m sold. I ask, a little hesitantly, if I can pay by card.
