I absolutely love learning new things and gathering new skills. I wound up getting into preparedness not because I’m scared of a disaster (although obviously I am a little bit) but because it’s an excuse to have all the hobbies and learn all the skills, and that means finding good information and putting it to the test. I’ve been meaning to put this list together for a long time, so here it finally is: a list of the books, channels, newsletters, and other media that I’ve learned from and recommend to others. These are all things I’ve personally used and found value in – I won’t list anything here that I didn’t think was useful or worth diving into.
There’s a lot on here, and the resources at the bottom of the list – websites, social media accounts, YouTube channels and podcasts – are all free, while the books in the main list should all be available from your library. You can ask about ordering a copy in, if they don’t have them. That said, I find a lot of peace of mind in having copies of these books myself, as I go back to most of them time and time again to look up specific things or refresh my knowledge on a topic – or just for fun, since I’m that kind of a guy. And, if I ever lost access to the library for any disaster-related reason, I’d be glad to have them on the shelf.
I understand you’re not made of money (though if you are, please consider donating to my Patreon as I’m certainly not sleeping on piles of gold every night) – so you may want to save this page and come back to it a few times. In that case, just bookmark it in your browser, and you’ll be able to click in whenever you want! The books and resources here are things I’ve collected over years, and unless you’ve got a big birthday coming up, it’s not reasonable to expect to get them all in one go.
Note To Publishers: if you want to see your books or resources listed here, get in touch on dan@startprepping.co.uk to send out a copy for review. If it’s a quality resource that I think people should have, I’ll add it here once I’ve read it.
Now, without any further rambling:
Recommended Resources For Preparing In the UK
Books
General Preparedness
Just In Case, by Kathy Harrison
This is probably the best book I’ve ever read on general, home-level, normal-person preparedness. It’s level-headed, with advice focused on ordinary people and families, and points tailored to all living situations and levels of income. You can tell when reading it that Harrison is writing from decades of lived experience.
It taught me a lot about prepping, and changed the way I do things a lot -. Kathy Harrison has laid everything out in a sensible, easy-to-follow structure that starts at the start and explains the reasoning and evidence behind each choice. If you only buy one book on this list, I’d strongly consider this one.
In her own words, “My objective with this book is to offer access to the kind of crisis information that will be helpful to ordinary families in extraordinary situations.” I think she hits that target very, very well.
Prepper’s Long-Term Survival Guide by Jim Cobb
Another great resource from a more traditionally American perspective, this book focuses on being ready for a long-term disruption or collapse, one which goes on for months or years. Despite the dramatic subject matter, it is still very level and measured in its tone and approach, and contains a lot of useful information and advice which often runs “against the grain” of what you might expect from an American survivalist.
Like Just In Case, it’s full of great individual tips and tricks, as well as more general foundational knowledge that will allow you to improvise your own solutions to problems.
When The Grid Goes Down by Tony Nester
Slim and inexpensive, this one looks at the survival needs of people and works on how to meet them in a variety of conditions – so rather than starting from “what to do if there’s a hurricane”, it takes the tack of “here’s what you need to survive and thrive no matter what, and how to adapt that to live through disasters and crises.”
It won’t take you long to read it, but you’ll probably keep coming back to it – it’s full of solid advice and interesting ideas for keeping yourself and your community alive in the face of crisis or disruption.
Another great addition to your library.
The New Complete Book Of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour
John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency has been a Bible for homesteaders, smallholders, survivalists, preppers and gardeners for decades, and when you read it, it’s easy to see why – it’s a genuinely phenomenal guide, extraordinarily thorough and specific in its teaching, and manages to be fun to read at the same time.
It’s clearly the result of a life spent walking the walk, and if you want to be more self-sufficient, regardless of whether you’ve got acres in the countryside or an apartment balcony to work with, there’ll be a lot of value that you can learn from this book. I can’t praise it enough.
Growing Your Own Food
The New Complete Book Of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour
I know I literally just told you about this book, but when I made the very next section of this list “Growing Your Own Food” I realised I had to list it here, too.
If you want to grow and preserve your own food, seriously, this book is phenomenal. Treat yourself.
Charles Dowding’s Skills For Growing by Charles Dowding
The original No-Dig Gardening pioneer, Charles Dowding popularised a method of gardening that works with nature in the soil, allowing delicate soil ecosystems to develop and insects and other microorganisms to establish themselves, without weakening the soil with constant digging, tilling and ploughing at it. His methods are a primary influence on how we garden and grow veg at our allotment, and I can say from experience that they work very, very well.
Skills For Growing is designed to work whether you’re a beginner who needs the basics, or a more experienced gardener who wants to level up to more advanced knowledge. It covers a huge range of skills, how-tos and information for growing your own food, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in gardening.
Rebel Gardening by Alessandro Vitale
If you’re on Instagram, YouTube or TikTok and you have any interest at all in gardening, permaculture, solarpunk or self-sufficiency, then you must have seen the incredible Alessandro Vitale, otherwise known as Spicy Moustache.
He’s an organic urban gardener growing huge crops of vegetables on a tiny urban plot in London, and both his book and his social channels (linked below) are amazing resources for ways to grow plants, recycle and upcycle materials, and use plants in unexpected ways so that nothing is wasted. A must for gardeners and anyone looking to be more self-sufficient and resourceful, as well as anyone who wants to grow their own food more sustainably, more cheaply, and more in harmony with the world around us.
The City Grower by Matt Franks
The City Grower is a book that sets out to teach its readers how to grow food in crowded city environments, with specific sections on growing indoors, on balconies, on rooftops, in yards and in any other space you can think of.
It includes direct instruction for ways to utilise limited space, upcycle discarded materials, and turn your balcony or garden into an abundant source of food.
What sets it apart from the competition is Franks’ tech-friendly and data-driven approach – he includes great ideas and skills like how to use your phone camera as a light meter to figure out the optimal places for growing certain kinds of plants, and how to create movable planters so that your plants can thrive even in places shaded by buildings.
Allotment Month By Month by Alan Buckingham
If you’ve ever wished there was a straightforward “how to” instruction guide for growing your own vegetables, Allotment Month By Month is for you.
It provides month-by-month, easy to follow advice on what to do and how to do it, clear guidance on when and how to sow, plant, and harvest your crops, and fantastic tips and techniques for protecting and nurturing your plants and keeping them safe from pests throughout the year.
If you’re new to gardening, this is a great place to start. It’s basically a step-by-step how-to guide for how to grow your own food.
The Half-Hour Allotment by Lia Leendertz
“Manage your allotment and enjoy fresh vegetables though the year on just half an hour’s work a day with weekends off.”
That’s the mission statement for this book, published by the Royal Horticultural Society and authored by Lia Leendertz.
This book is great for literally everyone as we’re all too busy – it combines expert growing advice with time-saving ideas and techniques that make the most of our limited time and energy and ensure bumper harvests.
I’m a fan of Leendertz anyway, so it’s great to see something like this from her – by following what she’s done, we can make growing food much more accessible and achievable, even in today’s too-busy world.
Almanac for 2024 by Lia Leendertz
Lia Leendertz is incredibly knowledgeable and thorough in her writing, and her Almanac is a great resource for keeping your timings in order throughout the year. An almanac is a resource book that combines all sorts of important information like farmer’s planting dates, foraging date ranges, average weather patterns, tide tables, and all sorts of other practically useful information with a calendar of the year. Almanacs like these were once a key resource for people trying to work with the seasons and keep themselves alive.
On top of that, it’s just beautiful and makes a perfect gift – that’s how I got my copy, and I love it.
The book that started it all, at least as far as my wife is concerned. No Dig is a gardening method that we’ve used for years and which we’ve found to be very effective – and one look at Dowding’s own vegetable plots will turn anyone into a believer, too.
The trick is to add mulch or compost material to the soil, rather than ploughing or digging it, and then plant into that – successively strengthening and nourishing your soil rather than disrupting the delicate web of microorganisms and creatures that exist in it. It’s explained very well in this book, and Dowding covers every skill and trick you’ll need to have spectacular vegetable crops that work with nature, rather than against it.
Cooking And Preserving Food
Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving
If you want to learn to can and jar your own food, or make your own jams, pickles, preserves, and salsas, then you’ll eventually get pointed to The Ball Complete Book Of Home Preserving. It’s been the gold standard for home-canning for years, and is full to the brim with interesting, delicious recipes that have been tested specifically to ensure that they can be easily and safely preserved. If you want to be the sort of person who gives everyone they know home-canned goods for their birthday (and why wouldn’t you be?), then you need this book.
Chef and anti-poverty activist Jack Monroe wrote Tin Can Cook after years of keeping herself and her young son fed in crushing poverty and food insecurity. In Tin Can Cook, the focus is on recipes that come entirely out of the store cupboard, and you don’t need to be a genius to figure out the prepping implications of that. If you don’t want to just survive a disaster, but eat well from your stores during, then I heartily recommend this book – plus, if you’re eating what you store and storing what you eat, then it’ll help you save some grocery money in your day-to-day life, too.
As the blurb says, ‘From Catalan Fish Stew and Black Bean Daal to Rhubarb and Custard Pancakes and Chocolate Pear Cake, these straightforward, sustaining and delicious recipes will transform your appetite to store-cupboard basics.’
Spring And Summer: Cooking With A Veg Box by Guy Watson
Riverford are a veg-delivery box that focus on organic, UK-based produce, and they provide these cookbooks based around the veg that is in season at any given time of the year. Even if you don’t subscribe to the delivery boxes (I used to, but can’t afford it now), you should still check out the recipe books if you’re interested in growing your own vegetables – since they’re based on vegetables that are ready to eat at the same time, they’re a great blueprint for meals from the garden.
Riverford Companions – Autumn & Winter Veg by Guy Watson
The Autumn and Winter season cookbook from Riverford, it’s full of hearty recipes that use the vegetables you’ll have in season at the time. We cook from it a lot over Autumn and Winter and the recipes are great.
I won’t waffle on – I’d just be repeating the Spring/Summer description – but if you pick up one, don’t forget to get the other!
ForaginG
The Forager’s Calendar by John Wright
Not to sound too dramatic, or anything, but John Wright is my foraging hero and I love him. The Forager’s Calendar takes the reader through the year, carefully explaining everything you’ll need to know to forage your way to a feast, wherever in the UK you are and whatever time of year it is.
He also covers laws regarding foraging, tools and techniques you may want in your pocket, ways to prepare the things you’ve gathered, and somehow manages to be hilarious while doing it. This is a great read even if you aren’t planning to go outside and eat everything, and if you’re interested in foraging, you should absolutely make sure you’ve got it on the shelf – it’s genuinely one of my favourite books, and I wish it was better-known.
Food For Free by Richard Mabey
You can pick this book up for a quid or two, and it’s small enough to fit in your pocket, so you can take it out with you when you go foraging or exploring and use it for reference in the field. It focuses on foods that can be foraged in the UK, with over 100 edible plants listed, fully illustrated with colour photos, descriptions, and directions for cooking and preparing the things you forage.
It even includes classic foraged recipe classics like dandelion and burdock and a bunch of others, with advice on what to pick, where to find it, and how to cook it all included – grab a copy and get out there!
The Hedgerow Handbook by Adele Nozedar
Described as “The ideal backpack companion for country walks and hedgerow foraging”, takes a feature of the UK’s landscape – the hedgerow – and shows us that it is much more complicated and rich than it appears at a glance.
This book is essentially a directory of the most useful plants that fill our hedgerows, right under our very noses, from “Angelica to ash, bird cherry to borage, pineapple weed to plantain and wild garlic to wimberries”, and from medicinal to culinary use, Nozedar teaches you how to use all of them, even including recipes like Spicy Ash Key Pickle, Red Clover Lemonade and Wild Raspberry Vodka. Since you probably didn’t know there was any food in hedges a minute ago, that’s a pretty great selling point for the book, in my opinion.
Bushcraft/Primitive Skills
The Bushcraft Boxed Set by Dave Canterbury
The Bushcraft Boxed Set doesn’t just look amazing on your shelves (although it does look amazing on your shelves), it’s also been the go-to bushcrafting guide set for generations of outdoorsmen, and the advice and information it sets out are really timeless.
You can tell that it’s a book from an older time – no references to ultra-light fabrics or 3D-printed gear to be seen – but it doesn’t need to be the most modern thing in the world, it’s a book about surviving in the wilderness and having a great time doing so.
There’s a reason these books have been a mainstay for so long – they’re genuinely excellent and a great resource for anyone who wants to spend more time tramping around outdoors and also doesn’t want to die of exposure.
The SAS Survival Guide by John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman
This, for me, was the book that started it all. I found The SAS Survival Guide in my school’s library when I was around 12, and proceeded to check it out so many times that when it finally fell apart, the librarian just told me to keep it.
John “Lofty” Wiseman, former SAS commando, has written a book that provides solid, dependable information on how to keep yourself alive in a huge variety of dire situations, including nightmare scenarios like surviving a boat sinking or aircraft crash at sea, and finding yourself adrift.
In his own words, “I do know that what I have written has saved lives in the past and I can save more in the future”, though he warns that the information in the book is not for everyday or recreational purposes – it’s a question of pure survival.
Simple Shelters by Jonathan Horning
This was an impulse-buy when I was on holiday and spotted it in a bookshop, and I’ve never been so happy about having such poor self-control.
This brilliant little book goes through the construction of dozens of “simple” homes (that is, not built with modern power tools or electricity) looking at not just how they’re built but why they’re built that way; at the cultures that produced them and the conditions that led to their development.
I’ve already learned a lot about shelter-building from it, and used some of the knowledge I picked up in a series of temporary and not-so-temporary structures on the allotment this year. If you’re interested in camping or bushcraft, you might want to give it a read – plus, besides the practical knowledge it contains, it’s just fascinating, at least to me.
Essential Bushcraft by Ray Mears
You know, Ray Mears? From the telly? He’s great at not dying in the woods, and in this book, he reveals his secrets of not dying to us.
In all seriousness, Ray Mears is one of the best survival and bushcraft instructors in the UK – he’s got decades of experience, and if you’ve ever seen his content, you’ll know that he doesn’t approach bushcraft with a sort of gritty, “shiver in a hole in the ground”, badass-survivor attitude like some bushcrafters do – his attitude is always one of respect and reverence for his environment, the people who developed the skills he’s using, and the history of the world he’s inhabiting, and as a result, he always seems like he’s having a great time and would be equally happy whether or not society disappeared.
If I’m ever lost in the woods and need to make a new life for myself, I hope want to make sure I have that good of a time.
Medical/First Aid
The First Aid Manual (11th Edition)
I shouldn’t need to tell you why you need a first aid manual in your preparedness library – ideally, you’ll keep it with the first aid kit.
It probably isn’t realistic to expect the average person to be able to memorise every single aspect of first aid for every single situation, so having a reference book like this can be a literal life-saver in an emergency. This manual is the UK gold standard for first-aid information and techniques, and if you have it, you won’t just be able to use it as a reference guide for yourself – if you’re locked in your home after The Event, you’ll be able to pass the time using this book to teach others life-saving skills, too.
First Aid Fast For Children And Babies
First aid for babies and children can be very different to first aid for adults. It’s often quickly covered in first aid courses or in guides, but to be properly equipped to help a baby or young child, you should really get specific training. It’s hard to beat an infant first aid course – but in the meantime, this book is a good place to start.
When you need to know these things, you really, really need to know them – I sleep easier at night knowing that there’s a trained infant first-aider in the house.
Even if you’re not a parent, you may have friends with kids, you may become an uncle or aunt, or you may just be in a public place when a child is injured has some other medical emergency – and if that happens, the skills in this book may wind up being the most important things that you ever learn.
Where There Is No Doctor by David Werner
This one is a little harder to get hold of these days, but it’s worth its weight in gold if you can get it – Where There Is No Doctor is originally intended as a medical text for isolated settlements in poor or developing areas which don’t have access to medical care, hence the title, I guess.
It’s equally powerful as a guide to providing the best possible care that we can in the aftermath of a disaster or crisis that cuts off our own access to healthcare – it provides practical, easily-understood information on how to identify, treat and prevent a huge range of medical issues, with special attention given to medical communication with the people you’re trying to help, nutrition, prevention and diagnostic techniques as a way to stop medical problems before they begin.
If you ever need it, this book might literally save your life and the lives of everyone around you. If the link provided doesn’t work any more, please let me know and I’ll find another one – like I said, it can be a tricky book to get hold of online.
The Herb Almanac by Holly Farrell
A beautiful book to have on your shelf, and one that can also be very, very useful in a pinch – The Herb Almanac is a seasonal guide to medicinal plants, with detailed information on 50 different medicinal herbs, all with beautiful and clear hand-drawn illustrations to help you identify them when you need them.
It’s also full of tips for both foraging for medicinal plants and growing them yourself, with recipes for the use of each plant that will help you to make use of them to the best effect.
Environment and Climate Change
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
“If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should be this” – The Evening Standard
The Uninhabitable Earth begins with the line “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” and it doesn’t get cheerier from there. An unimaginably thorough, well-sourced and authoritative treatise on climate change in its full horrifying extent, when I read this book I feel like I am staring transfixed into a crystal ball which is showing me the full scale of the crisis which we are in.
I can’t look away, though, no matter how bad it seems: I want to know the road which we’re headed down. I want to be prepared for whatever is coming, and in order to be prepared, we all need to know what is coming.
If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should indeed be this.
Security And Defence
Prepper’s Home Defence by Jim Cobb
Jim touches on this topic in the Long Term-Survival Guide I linked at the start of this page, but in Prepper’s Home Defence he can really dive into the topic in detail and provide the advice, information, and tips you’ll need to keep your home safe if and when the rule of law becomes… unreliable.
Grounded and based in a solid understanding of security theory and the practical realities of protecting your space, this book taught me a lot about keeping my home and family safe in realistic, non-Rambo ways, and keeps its feet firmly on the ground as it walks you through how to keep unpleasant things from happening, without ever devolving into action-hero nonsense.
A rock-solid intro to security after a major crisis.
Great Prepper Fiction
World War Z was published in 2006, and is a story about a fictional zombie apocalypse as told by its survivors in the aftermath. It’s a fictional documentary, essentially, which pieces together the disaster as it unfolded from diverse perspectives all over the world.
Here’s the thing, though: this book was so well-researched that it got its author a lecturer spot at West Point Military Academy, and it predicted a lot of the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is because, in the author’s words, he need to figure out how a global plague could start, how it could spread, and what would be necessary to allow it to conquer the world – and he did so so effectively that when a real pandemic came along, it followed his predictions almost to the letter.
Thankfully, without the zombies.
The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks
Another Brooks Zombie masterpiece, this fictional survival guide is entirely geared to surviving an outbreak of flesh-eating living dead, and is just as thoroughly-put-together as World War Z was. I’m including this here despite a lot of prepared people laughing at it as it’s got a few main points in its favour:
- It’s fun, and thinking about how to survive the zombie apocalypse is a primary pastime of mine
- It’s completely focused on its threat (zombies) and encourages the reader to seek expert knowledge on other survival-related subjects like agriculture or first aid in other specialist books
- It focuses on knowing the threat you’re facing and using that knowledge to think up clever and inventive workarounds to survive – for example, destroying the staircase of your home to shelter on the upper floor, as zombies will eventually overcome any fortification but can’t climb. It’s clever approaches like this that really inspire similarly inventive solutions to real-world crises.
Perhaps the bleakest and most beautiful book I’ve ever read. The Road is an absolute masterpiece.
Set several years after an unspecified disaster coats the entire world in ash, choking out the sun and killing off all plant life, The Road follows a single unnamed man and his young child as they attempt to reach the coast of a ruined America. The land is burned and devoid of life except for groups of predatory men who hunt anyone they can find, and McCarthy’s writing is suitably stark and beautiful.
It is not a book to read if you’re feeling vulnerable, but it is one of the best I’ve ever read.
The first of the acclaimed Silo series by Hugh Howey, Wool takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth in which humanity survives only in a huge underground silo.
No records of the time before the silo remain, and no-one knows what awaits on the surface – only that it is uninhabitable. That is all there is. It can’t be that there is life outside the silo. Can it?
Based on the absolutely cracking game series, The Last Of Us is a similarly cracking TV show that had me completely riveted even though I’d played the games and knew what was going to happen.
Set during and after a civilisation-destroying outbreak of a fungal pathogen that turns its victims into zombie-like monsters, a smuggler in one of the last remaining quarantine zones is contracted to smuggle a young girl out of the safe zone and into the hostile wilds beyond.
If you are a rickety old dude, like me, you’ll take heart from Pedro Pascal’s portrayal of Joel in this show. It made me think I might still have that dog in me after all.
Another TV show based on a game series, this time slightly more fun and less horrifically bleak.
Fallout is set in an alternate world, where the Atomic Golden Age predicted after WW2 actually came to pass, bringing with it an era of nuclear-powered cars, household robot servants, laser guns and American Dreaming… until the other side of the nuclear age fell on the world and turned it into a radioactive, mutant-infested wasteland.
Fallout follows a young Vault-Dweller, who emerges from the shelter of her underground nuclear vault two centuries after the bombs fell, to search for her kidnapped father in the wastes above.
It’s a ride, and if you like it, you’ll love the games. Just don’t side with Caesar if you play them, ok? Promise me?
Recommended Podcasts Coming Soon
Recommended Websites Coming Soon
Pages to include the in-depth guides offered at Ammo.com‘s preparedness section, among many others!
Recommended YouTube Channels Coming Soon
Recommended Social Media Accounts To Follow Coming Soon
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