Turns out, Britain is quietly becoming Slightly Anxious too
Author: Slightly Anxious Date: 19th October 2026 Time to read: 6 minutes
Slightly Anxious is here to help you turn any crisis into a manageable adventure — for you and everyone you care about.
A lawyer in Manchester, 25 litres of water in the attic
The Sunday Times ran a feature this weekend on ordinary households quietly stocking up against disruption. No bunkers, no biohazard suits — just a lawyer called Sarah Hunt, 29, keeping 25 litres of bottled water in her Manchester attic, a few tins of chickpeas and lentils, some candles, a £40 water purifier. A London professional the paper calls “Olivia” is doing the same: tinned fish, long-life milk, a handful of 5-litre water bottles, a box of lanterns and battery packs.
“I'm not talking about building a bunker,” Hunt told the paper. That line alone could sit on our own homepage.
Two preparedness sites quoted in the piece have seen the same shift from their own traffic: Start Prepping UK reports visits up more than 700 per cent in 60 days, to around 50,000, almost all from the UK; UKPreppers.com had 20 to 30 new enquiries in a single week. Most of the people asking, on both sites, are women in their thirties and forties — exactly the households we built this business for.
Why now
The paper named several reasons people are feeling it: a wet winter forecast, state-linked interference with infrastructure, and the general sense that digital systems have made ordinary life more interconnected, and so more exposed, than it used to be. MI5's director general, Sir Ken McCallum, used his annual threat report last week to put it plainly: “think the flicker in the power grid supplying your home”; “we should expect to be tested.”
None of that is a reason to panic. It is a reason to be, well, slightly anxious — and then to do something proportionate about it, which is the whole point of this website.
Lancaster, 2015 — the case study that still holds up
The Royal Academy of Engineering's go-to example in the piece is the Lancaster floods of December 2015, when a flooded substation cut power to more than 100,000 people. What went with it is the real lesson: no wifi, no mobile signal (base stations need power too), no card payments, no working ATMs. Gas central heating failed because its controls are electronic. Petrol pumps failed for the same reason. The local TV transmitter went down, which took DAB radio with it, and some flats lost running water because it relied on an electric pump.
Every one of those is a problem we already have an answer for —
Keep informed without the grid — a battery radio with spare batteries on hand, charged power banks, and a plan for the news if mobile data is down. (‘How to keep informed and keep talking’)
Plan for the heating cutting out — know which rooms you can keep warm and how, before the thermostat stops responding. (‘What to do when the heating stops’)
Have cash as well as cards — a card-only household is a no-payment household the moment the network blips. (‘What to do when the power goes out’)
Pack a Grab Bag once, not every time — the basics assembled in advance, so a bad week doesn't start with a scramble. (‘Slightly Anxious says Get a Grab Bag’)
The government says 2.5–3 litres. We've always said 10.
The government's own advice, quoted in the same article, is 2.5 to 3 litres of drinking water per person per day, plus extra food, a torch, a radio, spare batteries, baby supplies, sanitiser and wipes. That figure is correct as far as it goes — but it is a drinking-only minimum.
We recommend 10 litres per person per day for exactly this reason: once you add washing, cooking and basic sanitation to drinking, 2.5 litres disappears within hours, not days. It's not that the government figure is wrong — it's answering a narrower question than the one most households actually have. We cover the difference properly in ‘What to do when the water has been turned off’.
Quietly prepared, not quietly anxious
What struck us most about the Sunday Times piece wasn't the statistics, it was the tone. Nobody in it sounds frightened. Olivia, the London reader, put it best: “you're not going to die in a week, but it's going to make life a hell of a lot easier.” That's the whole premise of this website — not a worst-case mindset, just a sensible one.
If a national newspaper is now describing ordinary, unremarkable preparation as mainstream, that's not a trend we need to chase. We got there first.
Remember, keep calm and visit us here.
Sources
Madeleine Spence, ‘Don’t call us preppers, we just want to be prepared’, The Sunday Times, 17 October 2026 — supplied by Steve; article is behind a paywall.
MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum's annual threat update, October 2026 — as reported in the Sunday Times feature above; not independently re-verified against the MI5 transcript.
UK Government National Risk Register.
This blog post has been AI-assisted with human oversight.
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