UK Preppers Security Handbook

The UK Preppers Security Handbook is the collection of Home Invasion posts from the UK Prepper Handbook, which are in truth simply chapters posted as a blog. Written to military,  insurance and counter terror standards, it explains how to protect life and preps from marauders in without-rule-of-law scenarios. But it’s also a reference for anyone seeking or giving advice on physical security, apart from some genteel niches like internal offices.

It recommends assuming guns and bombs are unlikely to be used by burglars, although explains how to prevent it, and that vehicles will become a weapon for marauders, who will also come in numbers with heavy tools and be unskilled and happy to be noisy. It recommends assuming you can’t re-secure after damage during SHTF, that you will keep your walls as they are, your front garden gives no warning time, and nobody is coming to help.

It advises to aim for a security standard traditionally known as LPS1175 SR3, now called C5, but covers standards way beyond that. C5 is the sort of commercial security rating you would expect to see in a jewellers, whereas a typical house wall would be equivalent to a lower rating of about B5 or C3; in other words, roughly speaking, it would stop a claw hammer for five minutes or a lump hammer for three minutes. Your choice is usually first whether to reinforce walls, then whether to have stronger openings like doors and windows than the wall, gambling that intruders will prefer a window and only come equipped for that and not be able to knock the whole thing through brittle brickwork.

It advises being fearsome, staying put, arranging guards, using mutual aid groups to neutralise marauders before they arrive, and deploying layers, multiple technologies and redundancy.

Putting it into practice would cost several tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds, depending how valuable and attractive your life and preps would be. Reinforcing walls is dear, and jumping up from B3 to C5 products like doors is a big price difference. Even a B3 residential door like Fort SR2 costs about £4,000 with accessories, a C5 like a customised Stafford Bridge Sandhurst comes in at about £8,000. Spoiler: generally, physical security tends to mean adding plastic to glazing, steel to nearly everything else and concrete to the rest.

The handbook can take you anywhere from just new locks, through critical national infrastructure standards, to a full on Bond villain lair. It’s a security porn emporium, but don’t get carried away – sometimes training or retreat is the required tactic, and you have other priorities, like buying preps and staying alive long enough for SHTF to happen.