Bradley Garrett

Bradley Garrett (born January 4, 1981) is an American researcher of social geography and cultural geography, writer, and photographer based in Big Bear Lake, California.

He describes his research interests as being at the intersections of cultural geography, archaeology and visual methods and writes that his research is about "finding the hidden in the world".

He is the author of five books including Bunker: Building for the End Times, a contemporary account of doomsday prepping practices, and Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, an ethnographic account of the activities of the London Consolidation Crew (LCC), a group of urban explorers Garrett calls "place hackers".

He has written for several newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic, Vox, GQ, the Daily Beast, and The Guardian.

In addition to his work in human geography, Garrett has published academic research papers in archaeology, history, ethics, criminology, and visual methods.

He is not to be confused with the American actor Brad Garrett.

Garrett received a B.S. in anthropology and B.A. in history from the University of California, Riverside in 2003 before moving to Australia to undertake an MSc in maritime archaeology at James Cook University in 2005.

He did his first ethnographic research with the Winnemem Wintu tribe in Northern California about their loss of access to ancestral land inundated by the construction of Shasta Dam.

He then worked for private archaeology firms in Hawaii and for the Bureau of Land Management in California as an archaeologist.

In 2008, Garrett moved to the United Kingdom where he completed a PhD in social and cultural geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, with a thesis entitled Tales of Urban Exploration.

He was supervised by the human geographer Tim Cresswell.

In his public lectures, Garrett describes how the LCC came to notoriety first in 2011 when they released photos of the mothballed London Post Office Railway, a 6.5-mile subterranean train network used by the Post Office to transport post across the city.

Near the end of his research project, Garrett followed the LCC as they systematically infiltrated abandoned Tube stations in the London Underground without permission and posted photos online.

Soon after, Garrett began appearing on UK media discussing these explorations, describing himself as "the scribe for the tribe".

Upon completion of his PhD, Garrett took up a two-year postdoctoral research post at School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford from 2012 to 2014, where he was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.

He then worked for two years at the University of Southampton before moving to the University of Sydney in Australia, where he was a research fellow and conducted multi-year ethnographic research with "doomsday preppers" building for apocalyptic scenarios.

His last academic position was with University College Dublin in Ireland.

Garrett is now a freelance writer and host of the Tenacity Podcast.

His first book is Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City.

The book describes the exploits of the LCC, as they trespassed into hundred of locations over five years in an attempt to "reveal the hidden city".

The book was chosen by Rowan Moore of The Guardian as one of the best architecture books of 2013.

Garrett claims the goal of this work was to re-map London by opening out vertical urban imaginations and exposing the ways in which surveillance and control are embedded in modern spatial planning.

Garrett suggests surveillance is subverted and rendered inert through the urban explorer's "place hack" when control of the city is temporarily taken back through creative practice.

In a 2013 interview with Will Storr for The Daily Telegraph, Garrett described "place hacking", otherwise known as urban exploration, as a way of "...seeing the city like it's a puzzle and putting the pieces of that puzzle together, connecting things".

Garrett went on to explain that "...the more we feel like there are things we can't do and places we can't see, the more urban exploration has [a] capacity to give people hope".

In a 2014 TEDx talk entitled "Trespass is Good for Cities", Garrett told the audience that "When we explore cities, when we ignore the "no trespassing" signs and cross those borders, whether we can see them or not, we open up opportunities for critical creativity, we re-create space and we make the impossible possible."

Garrett was also invited to speak about his research at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House and at Google Zeitgeist in 2014, where he shared a session with Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States.

He was also invited to write a column for The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom about the dangers of privatising of public space.

In 2015, Garrett was the recipient of the James Cook University Early Career Alumni Award for the College of Arts, Society and Education in Queensland, Australia.

In February 2016 Garrett, along with writer Will Self, Green Party mayoral candidate Siân Berry, writer Anna Minton and comedian Mark Thomas, staged a mass trespass onto land owned by property group More London in protest of the privatisation of public space in the city.

The group occupied a private amphitheater called The Scoop and held an unsanctioned 2-hour event for a crowd of people.

On the Facebook page for the event, Garrett wrote that "one of the subsidiary effects of the rampant redevelopment of the city is that when the construction dust settles, often we find that open-air public spaces once maintained by civil bodies have been quietly passed into the hands of corporations as part of austerity-driven buyouts...It is time for our urban rambler moment; it is time to reclaim our cities."

As a result of this campaigning, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, established a charter regulating the management of privately owned public spaces in the capital.

In 2016, Garrett also released a virtual reality project built in collaboration with The Guardian called "Underworld", which allows users to venture through the "lost" Fleet River under London guided by Garrett who "guides users from the blood sewers beneath Smithfield Market in the City of London down to the Thames."

Garrett wrote a news column for Guardian Cities where public space, trespass and the underground are frequent themes.

Whilst recording for the 2016 BBC World Service radio show "The Forum" with Bridget Kendall, Garrett stated "if the 20th century was the age of the skyscraper then the 21st century is probably the age of the tunnel."

In 2017, Garrett began a three-year research fellowship at the University of Sydney, which involved embedding himself with doomsday prepper communities around the world who were preparing for a global disaster.

The resulting book, published in 2020, in first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, was completed with eerie timeliness, according to writer Robert Macfarlane.

The book received positive reviews from US and UK media outlets.

In July 2020, as part of the launch of Bunker: Building for the End Times, Garrett was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience hosted by Joe Rogan.