Bradley Garrett, Bunker: Building for the End Times – Allen Lane, August 2020

Update: see also this piece in The Guardian

‘Bunker is an extraordinary achievement; a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege and apocalypse told through the space of the bunker. Garrett has written a gripping, grim, witty work of geography and ethnography, which he completed – with eerie timeliness – in the first weeks of the COVID pandemic. A book about prepping and prognostication, then, which had already foretold its own future’ Robert MacFarlane

Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears: from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn’t take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere.

In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of ‘prepping’ for social and environmental collapse, or ‘Doomsday’. From the ‘dread merchants’ hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus.

The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it’s in our minds.