'Business is booming': Preston's Short-lived 1980s Nuclear Shelter Shop

25th December 1979: Safe in the knowledge that NATO leaders were too busy scoffing Christmas dinners and knocking back the booze to be concentrating on military affairs, the Soviet government covertly invaded Afghanistan. Not only did this outbreak in yuletide hostilities scupper world leaders' hopes for a relaxing festive period, it also wrecked any hopes of friendly relations between East and West. During the previous decade, Cold War tensions had thawed slightly; communists and capitalists certainly hadn't been best buddies, but they had been neighbours who would politely nod at each other over the garden fence.

As 1980 dawned, all that changed. Defence spending ramped up, missiles were moved onto airbases, and agitated whispers of 'world war three' and 'nuclear attack' began to appear on front pages, as an anxious public grasped at any piece of advice that could help them survive the coming apocalypse.

By 25 December 1980, one gizmo had made its way to the top of every doomsday prepper's wish list: a DIY nuclear fallout shelter. Fortunately, there was no need for people to wait for Santa to slip a shelter into their stocking; a multitude of retailers popped up in newspaper classified columns and in premises on the high street, each offering their own flat-packed shortcut to survival.

One such shop sprang up on the Fishergate Hill shopping area of Preston in October 1980, just in time for the pre-Christmas rush. The Nuclear Survival Shelter Equipment Centre was the brainchild of a 44 year old ex-steeplejack named Terry Laverne, who might not have been the best at coming up with short, snappy shop names, but who had a knack for jumping onto a passing moneymaking bandwagon if he thought it could make him a bob or two. Recognising that the survival industry was enjoying a 'mini-boom', Preston's answer to Del Boy set out to seek a fortune that he ironically wouldn't have been able to spend if the apocalypse had come.

Speaking to the Aberdeen Evening Express in November 1980 – a mere five weeks after opening his end of the world empire – Laverne claimed that he was not trying to sell fear and monetise paranoia. 'The fear is already there,' he said. 'Let's face it, people are becoming more frightened of the possibility of an atomic attack. We are merely offering a means of protection.'

Just what exactly were these 'means of protection'? Laverne's merchandise included flat pack metal cages akin to the familiar WW2 Morrison shelter, designed to protect people from the crushing rubble of a collapsed two bed semi. Inhabitants would presumably have to remember to grab a spade to dig themselves out afterwards before scrambling for shelter. To offer any kind of blast protection and to prevent the shelter being simply vaporised in the unworldly heat of a nuclear blast, this kind of shelter had to be situated a long way from ground zero; at least five miles away to stand any chance, according to Q.E.D: A Guide to Armageddon, a documentary originally broadcast in 1982 and available in full on YouTube.

Protection from radioactive fallout could only be achieved by barricading one's shelter inside a fortress of tightly cemented bricks. Bricks were not sold at the Preston Nuclear Survival Shelter Equipment Centre and would have to be acquired elsewhere, at an additional cost to the £1,300 Terry Laverne would pocket for flogging the basic metal frame – approximately £6,000 today.

Also on sale for preppers looking to go wild in the aisles were survival equipment kits containing protective suits of dubious quality, supposedly capable of safeguarding the wearer against gamma rays and bacteriological weapon attacks. Also available were 'reinforced blast doors', sold without an adjoining shelter and presumably intended to be affixed to an existing basement or garden outhouse that would be otherwise devoid of blast or fallout defenses.

The ultimate in nuclear protection on offer to the people of Preston was a top of the range, imported Swiss fallout shelter. For the bargain price of £6,000 – roughly £27,700 today – Laverne could dispatch a team of contractors with zero experience in the nuclear industry to a purchaser's home, where they'd dig a 'damn big hole' in the garden and plonk a steel and concrete box into the cavity. The excavated earth would then be dumped back on top of the buried shelter to provide moderate radiation absorption and give one's back garden the delightful appearance of a freshly dug grave mound.

Laverne's steel and concrete shelters came equipped with an 'eight inch thick reinforced steel door, also filled with concrete.' Ventilation would be provided by a Swiss filter unit, itself costing several additional thousands of pounds and which was said to remove all traces of fallout dust, provided it were cranked by hand for fifteen minutes every hour; an exhausting prospect at the best of times, even without the extreme panic and debilitating stress a nuclear attack would entail.

The shelter was accessed from the house or garden and could, Laverne suggested, 'be used perhaps as an office or games room until needed.' The design also included 'a second exit, just in case the house should collapse on the shelter.' A secondary purpose for the second shelter exit was also proposed for the nightmarish post-attack period, when feral survivors would loot, steal and kill for food or other means of survival: the escape hatch would provide occupants of the shelter with a means to 'launch surprise counterattacks on intruders attacking their property.'

Naturally, no guarantees were made regarding the effectiveness of the shelters; disgruntled customers, after all, would find it very difficult to lodge a complaint if their shelter failed to protect them in a nuclear war!

According to Laverne, business was 'going like a bomb' in October 1980. 'It's been going fantastic. Unbelievable,' he boasted in an interview with the  Liverpool Daily Post. He went on to claim that he had 'been accepting orders for top of the range shelters at a rate of about one a week' since he opened his shop five weeks earlier. Were this the case he would have earned £30,000 in just over a month, equating to a mammoth £138,500 today. If he'd kept up with this phenomenal level of sales, Terry would have walked away with the modern equivalent of over £1.3 million after his first year in business. This time next year we'll be millionaires, Rodney!

So confident was Terry in his bulletproof, Apprentice worthy business plan, after only four weeks of trading he was hoping to expand his empire by recruiting nationwide agents, who would sell fallout shelters and ancillary equipment in franchised outlets of his own Preston shop. Laverne posted classified adverts in various national newspapers, pitching his 'lucrative' business idea as though it would be a franchise model to rival McDonald's. Prospective franchisees would require their own premises with enough floorspace to display full-size mock-ups of various must-have bomb shelters. Exactly how many interested people contacted Terry we will never know, however given the lack of Nuclear Survival Shelter Equipment Centres on UK high streets today, we can safely assume that not too many took the bait.

Further holes begin to appear in Laverne's business plan when we compare his claims regarding just how many shelters he had sold. Contrary to the figure of one top of the range bunker being sold a week that he quoted to the Liverpool Daily Post, Laverne offered a more conservative estimate to the Aberdeen Evening Express: 'I've had six serious enquiries from people anxious to protect themselves in the event of a nuclear holocaust'. Serious enquiries, not sales. Perhaps when Laverne claimed that business had been going 'unbelievably', he was being literal: his sales figures really were too good to be believed by anyone with an ounce of common sense. 

Exactly how far the claims made by nuclear shelter vendors could be trusted was at the forefront of the Advertising Standards Authority's attentions during 1980 and 1981. Backed by the UK Home Office – 'which itself was struggling to acquire even a moderate amount of experience and knowledge on the subject' – the ASA issued a statement warning of the 'highly speculative and unprovable claims' that were rife in shelter advertisements. The statement went on to warn potential buyers to 'exercise caution when accepting [the claims made in] nuclear shelter adverts, pending an investigation by the Home Office.'

The Home Office didn't mince their words at the conclusion of their investigations. Minister of State at the Home Office, Patrick Mayhew, described shelter sellers as 'nuclear cowboys', taking advantage of a brutal, lawless industry akin to the Wild West. The Home Office went on to publish a clunky manual called Domestic Nuclear Shelters: Technical Guidance, which was intended to 'give the public a yardstick to measure the claims of existing nuclear shelters.' Alongside black and white diagrams of shelter assembly came a warning to buyers to 'check that someone [was] qualified, preferably as an architect or chartered civil / structural engineer' before asking their advice' on survival methods.

Unfortunately for Preston's Terry Laverne, his CV did not list 'qualified structural engineer' amongst his educational achievements. He was, of course, an ex-steeplejack, more experienced in the dismantling of structures than in protecting them from destruction. Government condemnation, coupled with a 1982 ban on making unproved nuclear shelter survivability claims in newspaper, TV and radio adverts clanged a death knell for shelter dealers such as Terry. With their indestructible shelters proved in the most part to be nothing more than flimsy metal boxes, retailers soon vanished from the public eye, as though vaporised by the heat of a thermonuclear blast.

All mention of Terry Laverne's apocalypse empire vanishes from the newspaper archives after 1981; indeed, even his name fails to appear in the press again. We must assume, therefore, that his company met the fate of so many others and collapsed, leaving Terry to move into his next moneymaking scheme...

Then again, Terry could have been telling the truth. Maybe he did do unbelievably well in the brief period that his business was operational. Suppose he had managed to con a handful of gullible Preston locals into parting with their cash in exchange for a stab at survival. As his customers sat in their steel shelters waiting for a nuclear holocaust that never came, Terry could have cashed in his dosh and enjoyed his profits in the luxury of a tropical paradise. He's probably there to this day, breathing in the sea air rather than regurgitated oxygen through a shelter ventilator, or marvelling at a blazing sunset rather than a burning city.

Now that would be 'unbelievable'.

Sources

Aberdeen Evening Express, 14 November 1980.

Banbury Guardian, 4 June 1981.

Domestic Nuclear Shelters: Technical Guidance, HM Government, 1981.

Liverpool Daily Post, 25 November 1980.

Morpeth Herald, 30 January 1981.

‘Q.E.D: A Guide to Armageddon’, 1982.

War Plan UK, Duncan Campbell.

Wells Journal, 2 October 1980.

Wolverhampton Express and Star, 10 September 1980.