Peaky Blinders Birmingham and the Workshop of the World

Birmingham is the most misunderstood great city in England. For two hundred years it was the workshop of the world — a place where, as the saying went, anything from a pin to a steam engine could be made, and usually was. Three-quarters of everything written with a metal pen in the Victorian world was written with a nib made within half a mile of where we’ll be walking.

By the early twentieth century it was also one of the toughest places in Britain — and that is where the Peaky Blinders come in. The real gang were violent, territorial young men from the slums of Small Heath and Cheapside who fought over street corners and racecourse pitches from the 1890s. The BBC series gave them twenty-first century glamour — but the real history beneath it is every bit as fascinating, and this tour tells you both.