Peaky Blinders: What the Show Got Right (and Wrong) About Birmingham

Birmingham owes Peaky Blinders a cultural debt that’s difficult to quantify. Steven Knight’s BBC drama, running from 2013 to 2022, turned the city’s post-WWI working-class history into one of the most watched British television exports of the 21st century. The Shelby family made Birmingham internationally recognisable in markets that had barely heard of it. Whether or not the show is historically accurate almost became irrelevant – the mythology landed.

What it got right: the Peaky Blinders were real. A gang of young men operating in Small Heath and Bordesley in the 1890s – the period of the show is shifted forward to the 1919-1930s, but the gang name and the general flavour of territorial gang violence in Birmingham’s industrial East End is historically documented. The razor-in-the-cap origin story is almost certainly apocryphal (working-class Birmingham boys couldn’t afford the good razor blades that theory requires) but makes for better television than “they were just violent and the name stuck.”

Small Heath, the Shelby family’s home ground, is a real neighbourhood in Birmingham’s East End that remains working-class and predominantly South Asian today. The Victorian terraced streets that defined it in 1919 largely still stand. The Garrison Tavern – the Shelby pub – doesn’t exist as a real establishment, but the fictional address on Watery Lane corresponds to a real street. Tours operate in the area for fans who want to walk the geography.

What it got wrong, or invented: the Midlands accent on screen is a strange composite that bears only passing relationship to how people in Small Heath actually spoke or speak. The degree of national and international operation ascribed to the Shelbys would have been impossible for a gang of this type and period. The fashion – those extraordinary overcoats, the flat caps worn at the exact angle – is gorgeous and entirely cinematic rather than documentary.

The filming itself was largely done in Liverpool, Manchester, and the North East – Birmingham’s Victorian architecture having been substantially demolished in the 1960s regeneration. This is one of Birmingham’s genuine historical losses: the terraced streets of Small Heath, Digbeth, and Aston that would have been the perfect Peaky Blinders set were largely cleared before anyone knew the show would need them.

The legacy for Birmingham tourism is real. The Peaky Blinders Festival, held in Digbeth, draws tens of thousands of costumed visitors annually. The canal areas and Victorian-surviving pockets of the city have become pilgrimage sites. The show opened a global audience to a period of Birmingham history that the city had barely processed itself – and in doing so, gave Brummies permission to be proud of a complicated, violent, inventive past. The Shelby family would have approved.