Peaky Blinders Location Guide is a perfect companion to the worldwide BBC hit series set in the gritty industrial heart of early twentieth-century Britain. Tommy Shelby might be a West Midlands gangster, but most of the series is shot in the north of England!
The Black Country Living Museum, Dudley, is open all year round to the public. It’s the perfect place for the Shelbys to stash illicit goods, situated as it is on a working canal. And as the museum is decked out in period guise to display the West Midlands’ industrial heritage, it’s ready for a TV production company to roll up.
Further north, Manchester’s impressive 1877 town hall is used when Sam Neill’s character meets Churchill, while the city’s Grade II–listed Edwardian swimming pool, the Victoria Baths, was mocked up for a horse fair. Before the Luftwaffe visited in World War II, there were many streets like Admiral Grove and Powis Street in Liverpool 8. Ringo Starr grew up there, and it doubles for the Shelbys’ home street in Birmingham’s Small Heath.
What the Wirral is to Liverpool, Sutton Coldfield is to Small Heath—the gentrified suburbs. Aunt Polly’s Sutton Coldfield House is filmed in Port Sunlight, a model industrial village on the Wirral that has been preserved thanks to its single ownership and strict leaseholds.
There are many station scenes in Peaky Blinders, especially the gripping finale to the first series, when the devious Inspector Campbell confronts Grace. As the scene fades, a shot rings out… You can retrace their steps at the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway in Yorkshire, which once served mills and villages in the Worth Valley.
Other sites include Brooke’s Mill, at Armitage near Huddersfield (playing a gypsy camp), Leeds’ Town Hall (an art gallery), Newby Hall & Gardens, Ripon (Grace’s undercover meeting location), Arley Hall, Cheshire (Tommy’s country house), and City Varieties, Leeds (a vaudeville theater). Coming soon in series six, the harbor at Portsoy in Aberdeenshire will be standing in for a French port. No doubt smuggling will be involved.
