This is the first of a series of papers presenting results from the SCUBA Local Universe Galaxy Survey ( SLUGS ) , the first statistical survey of the submillimetre properties of the local universe .
As the initial part of this survey , we have used the SCUBA camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope to observe 104 galaxies from the IRAS Bright Galaxy Sample .
We present here the 850 \mu m flux measurements .

The 60 , 100 , and 850 \mu m flux densities are well fitted by single-temperature dust spectral energy distributions , with the sample mean and standard deviation for the best-fitting temperature being T _ { d } = 35.6 \pm 4.9 K and , for the dust emissivity index \beta = 1.3 \pm 0.2 .
The dust temperature was found to correlate with 60 \mu m luminosity .
The low value of \beta may simply mean that these galaxies contain a significant amount of dust that is colder than these temperatures .
We have estimated dust masses from the 850 \mu m fluxes and from the fitted temperature , although if a colder component at around 20 K is present ( assuming a \beta of 2 ) then the estimated dust masses are a factor of 1.5–3 too low .

We have made the first direct measurements of the submillimetre luminosity function ( LF ) and of the dust mass function .
Unlike the IRAS 60 \mu m LF , these are well fitted by Schechter functions .
The slope of the 850 \mu m LF at low luminosities is steeper than -2 , implying that the LF must flatten at luminosities lower than we probe here .
We show that extrapolating the 60 \mu m LF to 850 \mu m using a single temperature and \beta does not reproduce the measured submillimetre LF .
A population of ‘ cold ’ galaxies ( T _ { d } < 25 K ) emitting strongly at submillimetre wavelengths would have been excluded from the 60 \mu m selected sample . IF such galaxies do exist then this estimate of the 850 \mu m is biased ( it is underestimated ) .
Whether such a population does exist is unknown at present .

We have correlated many of the global galaxy properties with the FIR/submillimetre properties .
We find that there is a tendency for less luminous galaxies to contain hotter dust and to have a greater star-formation efficiency ( cf .
Young 1999 ) .
The average gas-to-dust ratio for the sample is 581 \pm 43 ( using both the atomic and molecular hydrogen ) which is significantly higher than the Galactic value of 160 .
We believe this discrepancy is likely to be due to a ‘ cold dust ’ component at T _ { d } \leq 20 K .
There is a surprisingly tight correlation between dust mass and the mass of molecular hydrogen , estimated from CO measurements , with an intrinsic scatter of \simeq 50 per cent .