Inside Colin Furze’s Extraordinary Underground Home

My visit to Colin Furze’s apparently ordinary three-bedroom semi begins in a suitably ordinary fashion. He makes a proper cup of tea, complains that soaring steel costs are eating into his renovation funds, then takes me to his workshop. More specifically, to a hatch in its floor.

I climb down a ladder beneath the gardens of suburban Lincolnshire, follow a completely dry tunnel with tidy carpeting, pass through a bank-vault door he made himself, and emerge in the vast hangar he has dug out below his drive.

Ordinary has clearly left the building. My neglected tea cools while Colin - a pioneering YouTuber whose strange engineering concepts and wildly improvised inventions have attracted more than 13 million subscribers - explains the process of securing planning permission for a Bond villain lair.

Photography: Tom Barnes

“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!”

Colin Furze and the flamethrower moped

Being discovered through online antics is central to the Colin Furze story. One notable occasion involved police ringing him at his plumbing job to request ‘a word’ about a moped he had fitted with a flamethrower, then featured in a video.

“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.’

“So they took me to the police station, put me through the system and let me go on a caution. Then there’s a three-week wait before the Crown Prosecution Service decide whether to charge you. And the police just said to the CPS, ‘look, we know who this guy is. He does this sort of stuff – don’t worry about it.’ When I went back, they were a little more chilled.”

Chilled enough, in fact, that when Colin returned to the police pound three weeks later to retrieve the seized moped, its incriminating flamethrower remained in place.

Two decades of Colin Furze inventions

Colin’s output is not limited to potentially deadly hardware. Across 20 years on YouTube, he has created magnetic boots that let him walk across his workshop ceiling, a lamp powered by a two-stroke engine, a jet-propelled go-kart and scooter, a 360° swing higher than his home, and a travelator attached to the stairs to create the most punishing treadmill session imaginable without joining a gym. He has held records for the fastest dodgem and the fastest mobility scooter, and turned a BMW Z3 into a Bond car filled with gadgets.

When COVID restrictions required two metres of social distancing, he responded by making a ‘highcycle’ that could be ridden two metres above the ground. So what inspired this maverick to make the seemingly impossible?

“Growing up I was hooked on watching anything that had inventions in it – Back To The Future, Goonies, things like that. My eyes were on stalks.”

He was equally fascinated by the way the local travelling fair assembled its rides, as well as by the risks involved in riding his BMX. His instinct to repair things first took him into plumbing, but it also provided the basis for Colin to begin “mucking about” on YouTube just a year after the platform launched.

How has making videos for fun shifted over the past 20 years?

“Production values have all gone up,” he grimaces. “The original YouTube was a lot simpler. I mean, I haven’t changed much. I just try to think of a cool idea. I still don’t use radio mics or anything because I can’t be arsed with checking the batteries – I still shoot and edit everything myself.”

He has, naturally, made inventions that did not work. “There was one: this automatic bacon cooking machine. It had little rollers that got hot. The bacon would go through the rollers and come out cooked... but sometimes the bacon would just stick to the rollers, get all mangled up... then it set itself on fire. Back then I never had any CNC plasma cutters or 3D printers. I think if I have another crack at that, I probably would make a better job of it now.”

Fire, injury and the underground garage

Although his standard outfit is a short-sleeved shirt and tie, entirely without safety gear, Colin has sustained only one serious injury during his career as an inventor. Of course, it is documented in a video. “It’s called Getting Burnt, Popping Blisters And Peeling Off My Own Skin,” he reminisces cheerfully. “It’s age restricted as you can imagine.”

He laughs while describing his fortunate escape. “So I’d made a jet engine out of a Transit van turbo fuelled from a gas bottle. The combustion chamber was a toilet brush tube and a toilet roll holder, which was like sort of siliconed together and held with a chain. The oil system was me just pouring oil in the top, catching it at the bottom, just recirculating it.”

“I’d gone in for a cup of tea, come back out and forgot I hadn’t tightened the nut up on the gas bottle. So I was sitting here trying to get it started and of course it was leaking gas, then all of a sudden a spark shot out the back and it just went booooooooofff. Literally blew the workshop doors open.”

The more gruesome parts of the story can remain unspoken, but the lack of obvious scarring is striking when he points it out with pride.

Once the underground garage is finished, a rotating car lift will raise Colin’s DeLorean to ground level. The tunnel into the house will also continue beneath the garden, joining the concealed bunker lounge below his shed. “When we have a heatwave it stays nice and cool down here,” Colin says as the tour continues. That coolness is short-lived once he demonstrates his electric guitar, which throws out flames.

With so much concealed space, one question is unavoidable: has this distinctly Furze’d home become impossible to sell? “Everybody wants to know what it’s worth,” he laughs. “People say to me, ‘Oh, it’s worth millions now’ and I say, ‘If you had a million quid to spend on a house, would you buy one that from the surface looks like it’s worth 300 or 400 grand?’ The whole point is that it looks like a totally normal house, but there’s so much more underneath...”

And the neighbours, it seems, are overwhelmingly supportive of having a YouTube icon creating military-grade fun and games next door. Should they ever become fed up, there is no need for any fuss to establish what he is doing: they can simply send the usual address a YouTube link.