I’ve become a prepper. Now, where can I buy a fallout shelter?

Recently, a former senior army officer dropped in to see me at my home in Norfolk. We chatted over coffee in the garden, raising our voices above the thrilling roar of the F-35 fighter planes from the nearby RAF base.
My friend later messaged me to say how much he had enjoyed his visit but with a sting in his PS. He asked if I had considered “underground enforcement” in case of an attack. He had noticed, at the very least, that there was space under the staircase where I could shove a table for extra protection from smashed windows and falling masonry.
I read the message humorously to my husband. What are the chances? I felt like the residents of Midwest backwaters who believed that they would be the natural next target of al-Qaeda after September 11. There was a poignant solecism to thinking anyone would be looking at us.
Then I went to Waitrose and stocked up on bottled water, lavatory paper, tins. I looked hard at the buckets but couldn’t quite bring myself to buy one. It was like shopping during Covid. Panic buying with an air of insouciance.
I remembered whistling as I looked for paracetamol at a chemist near Portland Place, London, in March 2020 and, finding the supplies gone, making do with a packet of Feminax. I was past having to worry about period pains but I am pretty sure that Justin Webb, holding a packet in the queue behind me, was also unaffected by that particular affliction. We were just panic buying on the quiet.
When I got home from Waitrose last week, I also started to cast around for a table that might fit under the stairs. Obviously, I was not going to put one there, which would be eccentric, but it might be handy to have one near, just in case.
I have only once been in a building close to a bomb blast, which was the IRA Docklands bombing in 1996. Our Daily Telegraph offices were in the Canary Wharf tower, which shuddered but stayed intact. The news sub-editors got under their desks, while I seem to remember the arts journalists immediately looked out of the window. It was a matter of training.
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For the past few days I have been mentally calculating risk. It is far-fetched to think anything would happen, and yet, I have an old house with a cellar. As far as I am concerned, I am past the age of tragedy but what if I had grandchildren in the house? I mean, I could …
I came across a website called Subterranean Spaces, based in London and advertising nuclear bunkers and fallout shelters. Its home page explains, matter-of-factly, that when a nuclear bomb goes off, matter is vaporised in the fireball produced from the initial explosion and is exposed to neutrons. So far, so Oppenheimer.
It goes on: “A fallout shelter is an enclosed space designed to allow people to take shelter and minimise exposure to the harmful fallout until the radioactivity had decayed to a safe level.”
I email the site, and hear back from a pleasant-sounding founder called Charles Hardman, aged 67. I ask him, chortling, whether he is a magnet for survivalists. He replies that, really, we would all like to survive. Hardman’s background is in construction; he was part of the London basement boom of the late 20th century.
His business model changed in February 2016 when RAF combat jets were scrambled after reports that Russian bombers were heading for UK airspace. That is when he started getting calls from wealthy UK clients asking for bomb-proof basement shelters.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, his phone rang constantly. One woman was weeping that she only had £100,000 to spend, and if this was not enough to convert her home could she buy a share in a bunker somewhere?
More than a couple of years on, with slightly less media reporting, the fear levels of Russia have decreased and business is less frantic. On the other hand, Hardman reflects, what is happening in Israel is going to make people think: what about Iran? He doesn’t specify out loud the commercial upside.
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His clients, he says, are just taking precautions. The energy boss in Oxfordshire, the Swiss couple ordering a bunker for their daughter living in Rye. He points out that in Sweden bunkers are an integrated part of town planning. Just as we have road signs, they have pavement signs giving directions. In the Baltic states, they are sadly familiar with a state of threat. Hardman’s materials tend to come from Finland, our new Nato member.
The fear factor has spread beyond war. Hardman has had inquiries about heat-resistant basements in the wake of public awareness of climate change. Would we all just be safer living like hobbits underground?
I remain sceptical, partly from embarrassment, since I am an associate of the Imperial War Museum and have just filled in a survey for them on what I consider to be likely threats to the UK. I put cyber warfare and misinformation at the top of the list and conventional war and nuclear annihilation at the bottom. My reasoning: war is irrational and nuclear war is against the interest of humanity, hence the usefulness of nuclear weapons as deterrents.
On the other hand, I remember having a conversation with a former diplomat who had been posted in Moscow on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was adamant that it could not happen because President Putin would not do anything so crazy.
Hardman says: “If you are very wealthy you have your Ferrari, your yacht, your plane, the final tick in the box is to feel safe.” Luxuriously so. His expanding company, Subterranean Spaces Global, is providing nuclear bunkers with water, drainage, swimming pools, gardens. It is Atlantis for the rich. My bucket would not cut it.
I decide to take my chances. And think of the people of Ukraine and Israel, Lebanon and Gaza where bunkers are not high-end catastrophising but life and death.
Are you a prepper? Tell us about your own experience in the comments below