What year does Peaky Blinders take place?
Six series, one feature film, and a habit of skipping two to four years between them. The Shelbys age considerably faster than the episode count suggests.
The television series covers 1919 to 1934 — from the aftermath of the First World War to the rise of British fascism. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, released in March 2026, jumps forward again to 1940. That's fifteen years of story across 36 episodes, then a six-year gap to the film.
Series by series
- Series 1 — 1919. Opens on 6 February and ends on 3 December, the day Tommy calls Black Star Day, when the Peaky Blinders take Billy Kimber's betting pitches.
- Series 2 — 1921 to 1922. Expansion into London and the north, closing on Derby Day at Epsom, 31 May 1922.
- Series 3 — 1924. Tommy's wedding to Grace, Russian aristocrats, and Father John Hughes.
- Series 4 — December 1925 to 1926. Begins on Christmas Eve with Luca Changretta's letter and runs through the General Strike of 4 to 12 May 1926. Tommy becomes an MP in 1927.
- Series 5 — 29 October to 7 December 1929. The Wall Street crash and the arrival of Oswald Mosley.
- Series 6 — 1929, then 1933 to 1934. Picks up seconds after the series 5 cliffhanger, then jumps four years to Miquelon Island and the end of Prohibition.
The date that doesn't line up
In the series 6 finale, Tommy reads a newspaper report of Mosley's marriage to Diana Mitford. That wedding took place in Berlin in October 1936 and was kept secret until 1938. So either the last series covers rather more ground than it admits, or the date was pulled forward to suit the plot.
Where the film sits
"Birmingham, 1940. Amidst the chaos of WWII" — Netflix's official synopsis, 2026.
Tom Harper's 112-minute film opens with Nazi forgers producing counterfeit sterling intended to collapse British banking, and finds Tommy in self-imposed exile on a decaying country estate, writing a book. Steven Knight had originally planned to end the whole story with the first air-raid siren over Birmingham in 1939, and told Empire in 2022 he had widened the scope.
What comes after 1940?
Two further series, set in 1953 — thirteen years on from the film — built around Duke Shelby and the next generation. Charlie Heaton has been cast as Tommy's son Charles.
For the record: series 1 covers ten months of 1919 in six episodes. It's the tightest the show ever ran.