‘People are buying crossbows faster than I'd like' – how prepping went mainstream in Britain

The Guardian

20-05-2025

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.
During Covid, it was 'freeze-dried food, and a lot of people started looking into things a bit deeper,' Jones says. 'I've had retired GPs buying off me; I've got vets buying off me. It's completely opened up – it's not the old Rambo nuts.'
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Jones continues, 'we sold out like mad on gas masks, nuclear protection stuff, potassium tablets. We did a month's trade in a day and a half. It's all military-grade – we don't sell the stuff that's 30 years old.' They're not cosplaying preparedness, in other words.
Shehzad cautions respect around survivalism – preppers are not hysterical, they're very informed, she says. Or maybe the second leads to the first. 'They have a range of worries – geopolitical, economic, climate. International politics, also. They're very well-read, much more interested in what's happening around them than others.'
When the blackouts hit Spain and Portugal, 'we have these wind-up dynamo solar-powered radios', Jones says. 'I usually sell about 10 a week; I sold 40 in one day – that was my entire stock.'
Freeze-dried food is also flying off the shelves. 'I think a lot of people are on edge about cyber-attacks,' Jones continues. 'My local Co-op is empty – there's hardly anything.'
Ana, 40, took the fundamentals of preparedness as basic common sense. Originally from eastern Europe, now living with her husband and four-year-old daughter in Wales, she always grew her own food, and knew how to preserve and prepare it. 'What made me increase prepping was Covid – I was heavily pregnant, by myself in the hospital, I had an emergency caesarean section, I couldn't breastfeed my baby. My pantry was always prepared, but people were buying baby formula to put in their tea, until stocks were so low it was going for £300 on eBay.'
But if her contingency planning is sharper, it's still hedging against a pause in supply chains rather than the end of civilisation. 'I can't suddenly run away into the forest like all the macho guys do on YouTube. It's really funny – they all have families and wives that they're not talking about.'
Ten years ago, this was a very different scene. Lincoln Miles had just opened the UK's first prepper shop in Bedfordshire, and I went to see who was buying what. There were young men hunting small game buying wire saws that would 'bring down trees, go through bones', according to the packaging, but pretty small bones – of squirrels, pigeons, rabbits, shot with air rifles with the landowner's permission. There was a family – two middle-aged parents, two teenage boys – who were pretty sweetly trying to harmonise the parents' interests (living remotely, getting away from it all, self-sufficiency) with the kids' (using a catapult, dressing up in camouflage).
This is broadly what Jones meant by 'Rambo nuts' – people who want nothing more complicated than to feel that they are equal to the elemental tasks of surviving: killing, skinning, cooking, eating, and I guess not getting thirsty. (There was a lot of water purification, even back then. You're not doing this right, according to Canadian Prepper, unless you have at least two weeks' worth of water, and at least three ways to filter and purify it.) You could say it had a top note of idealised masculinity, but you couldn't call it toxic.
You could also just call it bushcraft. 'A bushcrafter is sat inside and wishes they were outside,' says David, a bushcraft expert. 'A prepper is outside and wishes they were inside. It's an attitude difference.' David isn't his real name: he has some pretty salty views on preppers, and doesn't want them on his case. He recalls going to prepper sites during Covid. 'You've never seen so many disappointed people,' he says. Because an emergency came along, and all they had to do was stay home.'
'Long-term, food acquisition is going to be really important,' David says. 'Whether that's foraging or hunting. But it's a very, very skilled thing: unless you are really experienced, you're never going to catch anything. You get preppers saying: 'I've got a couple of snares so I'll be fine.' Ultimately, bushcraft boils down to a deep knowledge of the natural world. The preppers I've come across just aren't prepared to put the time in – what they've focused on is buying stuff.'
Prepping has always had political connotations, but going back way further than a decade, I remember when those people were left wing: people such as my mum, jittery about the Cuban missile crisis, hoarding condensed milk, though never burying it, and having a plan for the nuclear holocaust that was slightly more advanced than the government advice, which was to take a door off its hinges and lean it against your dining table. The underlying politics were that all authority was ultimately authoritarian – that is, careless of the human beings within it, who, if they were smart, would at least have the makings of a cheesecake when The Man made his ultimate error.
The thinking outlived the imminent nuclear threat of the 80s. When the Iraq war began in 2003, my mum started to hoard water, and she still had a bunch hoarded from Y2K. She said she'd use just that for washing.
Now, unmistakably, if prepping has a politics at all, it's on the spectrum from individualist-right to fundamentalist-libertarian (though Shehzad, again, counsels against generalisation: 'I'm finding it very difficult to categorise them into anything. They come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, different levels of education: I cannot label them').
There's certainly an Ayn Randian passion for self-sufficiency in the language. 'You're as physically fit as you can possibly be. You've run flat out for a hundred yards in the past week. You've killed organisms and ate them.' Once you let the Canadian Prepper's voice into your head, he is strangely convincing. But it doesn't map neatly on to the community, whose preoccupations tilt way more towards the end of civilisation than their own wellness. 'There are some frankly Walter Mitty characters out there,' David says. 'I was teaching a little bit on firelighting, which is a lot easier from a crouched position. This guy couldn't get on to his knees. I'm not one to body shame anybody, but if you're preparing for an apocalypse, you have to be able to kneel.'
But what's harder to determine, and what makes preppers feel denigrated and non-preppers, indeed, casually denigrate them, is whether they are hugely more sensible than the rest of us, or a lot less. Plainly, they aren't imagining things. Parliament produced a chilling timeline of Russian nuclear rhetoric between February 2022 and November 2024 – a list of every time a Russian senior official had plausibly signalled a desire to nuke something. If we'd all engaged with it properly, the UK would also have run out of potassium iodide, as Norway did soon after the Russian invasion. The UK government launched a prepping campaign last year, prepare.campaign.gov.uk, that wasn't miles short of what many survivalists talk about on Facebook – supplies for a few days, a 'grab bag' (AKA bug-out or go-bag), medication for several days. And no one really noticed, except people who were already prepping. That's before you consider climate disasters, which none of us can say we weren't warned about.
So that's column A: preppers, smarter than you, actually. In column B, a lot of the advice sounds straight out of The Walking Dead. 'You know the people in your community that are going to be a problem, if and when the rule of law is no longer in force.' (I'm back with the Canadian Prepper.) 'You have a backup power generator. You have a map of places you can scavenge after the apocalypse. You frequently find yourself looking at your co-workers thinking: 'I wonder how long they would survive?''
'It's not exactly that life imitates art,' says Clare Birchall, professor of contemporary culture at King's College London, 'but that there's a certain recursive relationship between media and life. Dystopian tropes and aesthetics have long infiltrated reality. Many of those preparing for the apocalypse also believe they are in an existential battle with evil forces. Zombies are only partly metaphorical.'
Before Covid, nonfictional depictions of preppers portrayed them as 'a curiosity at best, a deranged group of weirdos at worst', according to Ed González-Tennant, digital archaeologist at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. 'After Covid, and amid renewed fears of supply chain interruptions in 2025, prepping continues to become more acceptable, or at least less strange.'
One consequence of which is that, in fictional renderings, a new dichotomy has arisen: no longer weirdo v realist, now antisocial v pro-social. 'Preppers such as Nick Offerman's Bill in The Last of Us are initially represented as hostile to the 'normies' who didn't see the end approaching.' If you haven't seen it, this is one of the most perfect self-contained episodes – an incredibly cultured prepper who prepped as a lone wolf, but only found meaning in his weapons cache through love. 'I particularly like that story arc,' González-Tennant says, 'because it reminds folks that prepping isn't supposed to be about out-surviving others, but building a better world. I think a lot of folks, especially preppers, get lost in weird fantasies about 'protecting' others that are really about controlling others.'
'I don't like selling on fear,' Leon says. 'I'd rather promote an active outdoors life.' And the industry can tolerate that kind of ambiguity. 'You can use a rucksack to go camping or for your go-bag in case the zombies come.' Nonetheless, you can see the fear in the shopping lists – 'When the Ukraine invasion started, it was wet food, dry food, people were buying crossbows faster than I'd like. Selling pointy things comes with responsibility; we take it really seriously.'
Does he have a go-bag? 'We definitely had a stash of food during Covid, but that was mostly in case we couldn't go to the supermarket.' What about Jones? 'I have a lot of stuff at home. Freeze-dried food, water, first aid gear, meals that are ready to eat, potassium iodide, gas masks. The usual survival gear, except I don't have knives.' Canadian Prepper carries at least two knives, a multitool and a torch heavy enough to double as a weapon at all times.
'You might meet a prepper who is all about the outdoors, crossbows, animal skinning,' Shezhad says, 'and you might meet one who is more than happy having water stored in the pantry.'
Once you start thinking about impending disaster, it must be hard to know when to stop.