In which Birmingham district were the real Peaky Blinders founded?

The real Peaky Blinders were founded in Small Heath, a district of Birmingham.

Small Heath was an industrial, working-class area southeast of Birmingham’s city centre and became closely associated with the historical gang. The group emerged in the late nineteenth century, decades before the television drama’s main storyline, which begins in 1919 after the First World War.

Historical accounts connect the gang’s early activity with territory around Small Heath and nearby Cheapside. An 1890 Birmingham newspaper report is often cited as the earliest known printed evidence of the specific name “Peaky Blinders,” although the gang’s exact origins and founding date are not perfectly documented.

The television series uses Small Heath as the Shelby family’s home base, which can blur fiction and history. The real gang was not the same organisation as Tommy Shelby’s fictional family, and the show substantially reshapes its people, chronology, and activities. Small Heath is therefore both a genuine Birmingham location and a major piece of the programme’s historical atmosphere.