The Black Country Living Museum, a faithful recreation of an early 20th century West Midlands town, is a frequent filming location for Peaky Blinders.supplied
Discover how England’s West Midlands has played a starring role in some of your favourite film and TV shows
Our screens spark our travel fantasies. Engaging stories and vivid film and TV characters bring settings to life and make us want to see them for ourselves.
Birmingham—a bustling city in England with a thriving cultural scene and heaps of character—and its surrounding West Midlands region have attracted film crews for historical destinations and scenic vistas. Easy access from London – just 90 minutes by express train – certainly helps, especially if you like to theme your sightseeing around your latest binge watch. (Another reason to go? The Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games kick of July 28.)
Peaky Blinders, the hit series about a Birmingham crime gang set shortly after the First World War, is filmed in the surrounding area, because the city has modernized considerably since then. This means filming locations are largely outside the cosmopolitan area.
One of the best places to walk in gang leader Tommy Shelby’s footsteps is the Black Country Living Museum in nearby Dudley. The open-air museum is a faithful recreation of an early 20th-century West Midlands town, complete with pubs, shops and houses, and actors in period costume sharing tidbits about life in the era.
More of a sci-fi fan? While the 2018 Steven Spielberg blockbuster Ready Player One is set in a futuristic Columbus, Ohio, it was actually filmed in Birmingham. The city’s industrial past means it has a few pockets that make good stand-ins for a dystopian city of the future, with the addition of some temporary graffiti and American street signs.
Chase scenes were filmed on Livery Street, just at the edge of the Jewellery Quarter, a historical district that was once the hub of the art in Britain and where 40 per cent of the country’s jewellery is still manufactured. Filled with old-world buildings, contemporary shops and museums (including the Coffin Works – yes, a museum devoted to coffins), it’s a fun way to pass an afternoon.
Just down the road you’ll find Wolverhampton, a smaller city that had its own star turn playing itself in How To Build A Girl, an adaptation of best-selling local author Caitlin Moran’s novel, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.
Wolverhampton’s Goldthorn Avenue also makes a cameo in Steve McQueen’s critically acclaimed 2020 anthology series Small Axe, which earned British actor John Boyega a best supporting actor Golden Globe for his role as trailblazing police officer Leroy Logan.
The world’s most famous playwright also hails from the West Midlands, and the area offers a wealth of ways to explore the countryside that shaped the mind behind umpteen film and TV adaptations.
William Shakespeare was born and raised in a traditional half-timbered house in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. Located in the centre of this historic market town, the bard’s birthplace still stands and it is now a popular museum.
Shakespeare’s New Place was his home for the last two decades of his life. The building, which at the time was the second-largest house in town, is long gone, but Elizabethan-style gardens and guided exhibitions make it worth a visit and offer insight into his latter days.
Cap your visit off with a performance at the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose theatre is located right on the river Avon, and performs a repertoire of his greatest hits, plus a roster of other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights and some modern works as well.
Another literary legend inspired by his native town is J.R.R. Tolkien, who drew on the landscape of the West Midlands when he penned his renowned Lord of the Rings series, later turned into a behemoth movie franchise by Peter Jackson.
Fans of the trilogy will enjoy channeling their inner Frodo and journeying the Tolkien trail, which takes in a number of local sites that found their way into the author’s works, and the films they inspired (although astute LOTR fans will know those were mostly filmed in New Zealand).
It includes Sarehole Mill, a traditional working mill near where Tolkien lived for part of his childhood and that the Shire—idyllic home of the hobbits—was based on. The mill, a little south of the city centre, has been well preserved and it is now a museum. The otherworldly beauty of the nearby Moseley Bog, where Tolkien played as a child, also sparked his imagination when he conjured the Old Forest, a foreboding place just beyond the borders of the Shire.
The West Midlands is a cinematic dream of a trip – and it’s ready for its moment in the spotlight on your next visit to England.
The “Brummie” Hall of Fame
Meet some of the other famous faces with ties to Birmingham.
Felicity Jones
This Oscar-nominated actress was born in the city’s Bournville area in 1983.
Ozzy Osbourne
The “prince of darkness,” famous for his proudly Brummie accent, grew up on Lodge Road in Aston.
Laura Mvula
Born in the city, this critically-acclaimed musician also graduated from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with a degree in composition.
Simon Le Bon
This 80s icon had his own academic sojourn in the city, studying drama at Birmingham University before Duran Duran came knocking.
Learn more about the West Midlands.
Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with Visit Britian. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.