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A few days ago, the government sharpened its stock-up-to-survival advice for the nation. The centerpiece of Be Ready! is likely to be a checklist of essentials – food, water and kit like a wind-up radio – to deal with severe disruptions over three days, from a weather emergency to an all-out cyber attack. Hours after the advisory was published, electronics retailer Maplin recorded a 284 percent jump in sales of torches, a 100 percent jump in sales of power banks, while radio sales increased by 92 percent – and Iceland recorded a 40 percent increase in sales of canned goods over the weekend. But London’s prepper community is already stocked and prepared. It’s time to watch and learn.
Alex lives in a 1950s house in North London with her husband and a rotating cast of three children, aged 13 to 24. Prepping is her natural default. “I just want to be ready when someone comes in.” Covid provided confirmation: “If people are running out of toilet rolls, I’ve never dropped below 36. Never do.” Their pantry, cabinets and under-stairs storage hold cans bought by the case (usually boxes of 12), pasta, rice, eggs and every household essential you could think of. She also has three refrigerators. “I also never go under a dozen eggs or half a tank of gas, even if I think I need an egg substitute,” she says. Even their jars of dried pasta have “backstage” refill bags. Her husband previously worked for a food charity and rotates the stock. “I do the buy-in, he does the clearing.” She says she doesn’t write lists but has an uncanny ability to form a shelf or a cupboard instead of knowing the gaps. It sounds like the prepper form of synesthesia – when some musicians see colors when they hear certain notes. “When I dive, I replace it,” she says.
“I could look at my lot for three weeks, print four”
She shuns upscale survivalist kit. “I couldn’t not use expensive things.” Recently she was “good” to miss out on a £15 Lidl solar charging station which sold out before it got there. She currently has 12 liters of water (“not enough”) but has several suitcase-sized containers in the garden ready to fill from the tap. Last month she filled one and drove it to a relative when her mains water failed. (“A dry run, or should that be a wet run?”) Her camping stove is borrowed, but she has reason to cook by the fire pit. All in all, how long could she manage? “I could look at my lot for three weeks, print four.”
This is well above average. Government advice starts at three days, but a Cabinet Office survey this year found a quarter of Londoners believed they could not manage more than a day without utilities.
Craig* lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats in Lambeth with his partner and young child. The government’s three-day specification does not impress him – he thinks of survival in months and years. He previously lived in Australia, where he found more off-the-shelf “prepper products,” such as tubs of freeze-dried emergency meals. Instead, he uses catering buckets and fills them with heat-sealed Mylar packets of food. The bottom row of a large Ikea bookcase against one wall of his living room is filled with neatly labeled buckets of rice, lentils, beans, pasta and oats. The other shelves are filled with hygiene products, wind-up electronics and torches, many of which he bought during Covid but often tested. The top row is now reserved for nappies, formula and Calpol. “Since the Covid, we have had a baby, so this is new.” His must-have item? Eight rolls of black bags: “Garbage collection would stop.”
He adores Costco’s 940-litre range of Kirkland Signature Spring Water, which is currently on offer for £299.89, or 32p per liter – as do many preppers. But his partner vetoed it, because there is too little space for 1,880 bottles. For now, he makes do with a “small” piece of 20 liters of water and a 3.8 liter gravity filter bag, which can be filled with untreated water, pulled through a filter without electricity.
Food researcher Professor Paul Behrens lives in North London with his partner. He began removing food recently while working on the National Emergency Briefing, a public information initiative focused on how extreme heat is disrupting supply chains. He stashed two months’ worth of supplies in a special cupboard: oats, rice, pasta, beans, nuts and olive oil, collected by buying a little extra with each store. While prepping gets a bad rap as a selfish pursuit, he believes it’s important to consider the “pro-social” aspect. If the supply is interrupted, he does not need to participate in the rush to supermarkets, more left to those who need them.
London’s prep scene is a broad church that runs the full spectrum from casual acquisition to deep survivalism. I’ve come to think of it as a colorful orchestra, each playing according to their own fears, circumstances and budgets. But as millions more potentially participate, this orchestra could do with a conductor.
The practical cost of urban prepping
Animator Dom Brooks could be that conductor. He created the Provision app, which you can download for free. Brooks and his wife have two young children and keep emergency supplies in a large garden box in the loft, a habit they picked up during Covid. He developed Provision after he got tired of climbing stairs to check expiration dates and because “everyone hates spreadsheets”.
In part, it is a sophisticated stock manager. You enter the members of your household – including pets – and then your existing supplies, either manually or by scanning barcodes. It will calculate how many days’ worth of food, water and essential medicines you have, identify what is likely to run out first and mark expiry dates. You can use the app to work out the gaps, generate a shopping list and replenish supplies through shopping links – mainly on Amazon, where Brooks can earn money from affiliate links. It can also monitor local weather warnings.
People were encouraged to stockpile supplies
But when disaster strikes, if you have enough phone battery, you also have an apocalypse manager to hold your hand. When London’s faucets run dry, it switches from preparing to managing your reserves via its offline inventory. In short, it is designed to help you make decisions when an emergency unfolds.
How much would it cost to stock like this? According to the guidance of the provision, 90 days’ worth of food and water for one person would come in at around £300, or £750 with equipment. For a family with two children it is around £850, or £1,760 with equipment.
That’s a big expense. Does the threat level deserve that? It’s a question that can feel like an impossible cost-benefit analysis, as if each household had to triangulate the distance between a wholesale cyberattack and investing in a ton of water from Costco.
Why is it not enough to stash cans
Professor Washington Yotto Ochieng, head of the Center for Active Resilience and Security at Imperial College, describes London’s threats as a Pentagon diagram: cyber attacks, physical threats, social disruption, environmental risks and biological emergencies form each page. These threats are increasingly intersecting. A flood could, for example, coincide with a cyber attack on healthcare. Yes, folks, we have it all! London depends on interconnected transport, energy, water and communication networks. As systems become more digital, “the actual attack surface increases”. Ochieng also believes that London has lost some of its preparedness culture as we have enjoyed “relative calm”.
Most of us start the fight back to resilience with food. Tim Lang, Emeritus Professor of Food Policy at City St George’s, University of London, has shaped Britain’s thinking on food security, including London’s preparedness for disruptions to its food supply. He’s not a fan of the word “prepping” for starters – “Oh, don’t use that Lucy!” – prefer “civilian food resilience”. His concerns are not just linguistic. “Where should people put everything? How can families struggling to afford food reserves build up reserves? What is a refrigerator in a power outage? And what happens after three days?” These are all good questions.
“You can’t expect individuals to solve the fault lines of the food system,” he says. Our ultra-efficient, just-in-time food system has, according to Lang, made us incredibly vulnerable. The entire country depends on 131 large distribution centers; Tesco alone moves its food through only 20 hubs. Knock out enough of these and the supply is in serious trouble. In London, where 30 million meals are served every day, Lang’s work uncovered a food system so complex that no one had a complete picture of how the capital was fed.
“The big shocks to the food system are not solved by storing food”
“The big shocks to the food system will not be solved by storing food,” he says. But even Lang, who lives with his wife in central London, keeps an emergency pantry. It contains “30 huge jars of beans and chickpeas, dozens of baked beans, 24 cans of tomatoes, sardines and dried fruit. We only store food that doesn’t need to be cooked,” he explains, although there is also rice and dal, a legacy of his childhood in India, and dried pulses. These require heat, but he does not have a camping stove. He worries about keeping the gas canisters inside.
José Escribano, a disaster response and evacuation researcher at Imperial College, emphasizes that preparedness offers psychological benefits, including a sense of control. This “avoids despair,” which can lead us to make worse decisions in an emergency. This is supported by studies that show that the belief that we can take effective action is a key determinant of success when disaster strikes.
But I wonder – what other effective action might look like? Could London prepping, like our danger risk, also have a larger area? Zooming in, Suzanne from Earlsfield crosses a home-grown squash, wider than her shoulders. Suzanne considers herself to be a community resilience builder, connecting people and skills – not a prepper. But it seems like she would be handy in a crisis. She saved water from her dehumidifier in large bins in the garden which were used to flush the loo when needed.
I return to Ochieng and ask how he is preparing. He says he adds supplies to his monthly business and stores them in his garage. But that is not his priority. What is? “The thing I need to do is get to know my neighbors because the next time something happens, at least then we’ll know what to do as a community.”
