When did Peaky Blinders take place? The real Birmingham gang peaked before the Shelbys' story even begins
Peaky Blinders opens on Tommy Shelby riding a horse through the mud of Small Heath, a few months after the armistice. The show is unusually precise about its dates, and it keeps them across six series and a film.
The series runs from 1919 to 1934, and Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man jumps to 1940. The actual Birmingham gang the show borrowed its name from had peaked, faded, and been pushed aside by rivals well before any of that.
Series by series
- Series 1 (1919) — February through to 3 December, the day Tommy calls Black Star Day.
- Series 2 (1921–1922) — ends on Derby Day, 31 May 1922.
- Series 3 (1924) — opens with Tommy's wedding to Grace.
- Series 4 (1925–1926) — begins on Christmas Eve 1925 and runs into the General Strike of 4–12 May 1926.
- Series 5 (1929) — the Wall Street Crash, and Tommy's first dealings with Oswald Mosley.
- Series 6 (1933–1934) — the end of American Prohibition, and Mosley's fascist campaign.
- The Immortal Man (1940) — Tommy in a bombed Birmingham during the Second World War, released on Netflix on 20 March 2026.
Fifteen years of story, then a six-year gap before the film.
The real gang had gone by then
The historical Peaky Blinders emerged in Birmingham in the late 1880s. The name reached print in the local press in March 1890, after a man named George Eastwood was beaten badly enough to lose part of his skull. Their years of genuine menace were the 1890s.
A letter to the Birmingham Daily Mail on 21 July 1898 complained that gangs of "peaky blinders" were to be found in every part of the city.
By the early 1900s they were finished as a force. Billy Kimber's Birmingham Boys had taken over by the 1920s, and the Sabini gang displaced the Birmingham Boys in turn. Series 1 starts roughly two decades after the real gang's peak. The film sits about fifty years after it.
What else the show made up
- The razor caps — historian Carl Chinn, author of The Real Peaky Blinders, has pointed out that razor blades were an expensive luxury in the 1890s. The name most likely came from the peaks of the caps, worn pulled down over one eye.
- The Shelbys — no such family ran Birmingham. Steven Knight has cited family stories instead, including relatives named Sheldon.
- The empire — the real Blinders were a loose network of backstreet gangs around Small Heath, Aston, and the Bull Ring, mostly teenagers, robbing whoever looked easiest. Not a bookmaking and shipping concern with a seat in Parliament.
Billy Kimber was real, though — and Birmingham-born rather than the Londoner the show makes him. Chinn reckons he was a Peaky Blinder himself at one point.