Mines a double

YouTuber Colin Furze’s latest brainchild - to dig a double garage bunker under his house - is the most ambitious project yet from Britain’s wackiest inventor

- WORDS OLLIE KEW

My morning at Colin Furze’s perfectly normal semidetached three-bed starts... normally.

He brews me a sturdy cuppa, bemoans the price of steel pinching his home improvement budget, and shows me into his workshop. To the floor hatch. Onto the ladder, descending below the gardens of suburban Lincolnshire. Along the (perfectly dry, neatly carpeted) tunnel, to his homebuilt bank vault door. And into the whopping hangar he’s excavated under his driveway.

Nothing’s normal any more. My forgotten tea goes cold as Colin – a pioneer YouTuber with over 13 million subscribers following his bizarre engineering ideas and mad homebrew inventions – talks me through how you get planning permission for a Bond villain lair.

“The council see something on the internet and they ring me up, which I’ve always argued is easier than trying to ring the council for permission – you’ll be on hold for ages. Now they just ring me!”

Having antics spotted online is a big part of the Furze origin story. Namely the time the police called him while he was at his day job, plumbing, and asked for ‘a word’ concerning the moped he’d equipped with a flamethrower and posted a clip of.

“They rang me at work and I said, ‘I’ve got somebody’s water off! I can’t come at the minute.’ The second the phone went down I went bombing home in the van because I thought ‘it’s about the bloody moped’. I was going to rush back here and take the flamethrower off the back of it. But they turned up literally as I did.

“The policeman asked me, ‘Have you got a firearms license?’ ‘No.’ ‘You’re not allowed flamethrowers,’ he said. ‘They’re prohibited weapons – only the army can have ’em.’