Birmingham: the cradle, or at least the locomotive, of the industrial revolution (without going any further, it was there that James Watt found the money to build the steam engine and make a fortune). So, since the last quarter of the nineteenth century one of the English capitals of the first youth gangs. This breed was called ‘hooligans’. The Shelby clan of ‘Peaky Blinders’ pays homage to the dress and hairstyle of these thugs, even though they’re flashy enough to seduce Loquillo, who looks like an extra from the series in the latest teaser images. And there was a street gang in Birmingham called the Peaky Blinders, though you can be sure they didn’t do the mixing as much as Tommy and his brothers. We’re leaving Birmingham here, as the scenes where the Netflix production was filmed were elsewhere.
The nearby Black Country Living Museum in Dudley provides one of the series’ most distinctive settings, Charlie Strong’s racket. somehow preserves the family’s gypsy roots and where the same height issues are covered, where troops are armed with objects to hit and cut.
Oh, the proletarian street where the Shelbys run their betting business isn’t in Birmingham either, it’s Powis Street in Liverpool. The city where Admiral Grove is located is another street from the original Peaky Blinders principality and The birthplace of nothing more and nothing less than Ringo Starr.
Movie soundtrack
Aunt Polly’s home is in the Port Sunlight residential complex in Wiral, next to Liverpool, and Tommy’s office is in an industrial building on Cater Street in Bradford. Other venues are provided by Bradford’s Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford City Council, Liverpool Cathedral and Saint George’s Hall and Leeds Town Hall.
Although there is nothing to see for ‘Peaky Blinders’, Birmingham has a prominent place in modern popular culture. Regardless of the series’ anachronistic but post-punk orientation, the great soundtrack could have been bigger and closer to the city and the iron-and-steel images of fiction. It’s not for nothing that Black Sabbath and Judas Priest came from Birmingham.. Nor that they will rhyme the songs of both totems of heavy metal with the iron and flame aesthetics of the series. But heavy metal, you know, isn’t ‘cool’.
As an industrial and prosperous city, Birmingham was an early destination for expats, something that reflected the ‘Peaky Blinders’ if not so much. A song by the great country folk reggae-pop band The Beat was out of tune. It would be more difficult to place the same style of molasses from the UB40.
And anyway, the songs of the Electric Light Orchestra would be impossible to match the tone of the series.To Jeff Lynne and, for a short time, Roy Wood, the most famous band to come out of Birmingham (and pretty much every city for that matter). Try to imagine the ‘last train to London’ as the background noise Tommy Shelby makes as he travels on a barge. No means no.