Bradley Garrett is a cultural geographer, photographer and writer based in Morongo Valley, California. He is the author of five books, translated into four languages, and is currently writing Groundbreaking: How Tunnels Define the Modern World for St. Martin’s Press.
He began his career as an archaeologist with the United States Bureau of Land Management, surveying and mapping sites across the high desert of northern California. An MA in maritime archaeology took him underwater to dive shipwrecks and submerged ruins in Australia. A PhD at the University of London took him underground.
Brad moved to London in 2008 and spent the next four years slipping into the lost, forgotten and off-limits places of the city alongside an urban exploration crew called the London Consolidation Crew — photographing ruins, sewers, ghost stations and half-built skyscrapers across eight countries. The book that came out of it, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso, 2013), was named one of the best architecture books of the year by The Observer, translated into Korean and Japanese, and optioned for a feature film in Los Angeles.
While at the University of Oxford he published Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital (Prestel, 2014), a photographic dissection of what lies beneath the city layer by layer, followed by London Rising: Illicit Photos from the City’s Heights (Prestel, 2016), which documents its social, infrastructural and corporate verticalities. Bunker: Building for the End Times (Penguin / Simon & Schuster, 2020) followed prepper communities across four continents as they prepared for collapse; Sir Richard Evans named it a Book of the Year in the New Statesman.
After a decade as an academic — teaching at Oxford, Southampton, Sydney and University College Dublin, and publishing more than fifty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters — Brad struck out to work independently as a writer and photographer. He writes for The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Yorker, GQ, Vox and The Telegraph. His photography has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Wired and Forbes, and on the covers of ES Magazine, Times Higher Education and The Red Bulletin.
He hosts the Tenacity podcast for Ubisoft Entertainment, and appears in Underland (2025), nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival. His work has been covered by 60 Minutes, the Joe Rogan Experience, 99% Invisible, the History Channel and the BBC. He has spoken at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, Google Zeitgeist, Chicago Ideas Week, Tate Modern, the Barbican and the British Library.
Contact me at [email protected] or by using the form below
