Birmingham has erased more of its own history than almost any English city outside London. A 1838 railway terminus locked behind a fence since 1966, waiting for HS2. A street where two serving police constables in 1987 — no, wrong city. A pub where UB40 filmed "Red Red Wine," demolished in October 2020 for a project that still hasn't broken ground. The street that gave the Peaky Blinders their name, still standing under the same railway bridges from 1890. In this video, we explore: → Curzon Street, the 1838 entrance hall that was Britain's first London railway terminus, locked to the public since 1966 and now sitting behind HS2 hoardings until at least the 2030s → Needless Alley, a narrow passage off New Street whose name two separate generations of historians have failed to explain — needle-makers, brothels, or something the city decided to forget → Watery Lane in Small Heath, the real territory of the actual Peaky Blinders, demolished in the 1960s for Herbert Manzoni's Middle Ring Road — now just a slip road carrying the name as a footnote → The Steelhouse Lane lock-up tunnel, where prisoners were moved from cells to court without ever appearing on the street, said to be one of the most haunted places in Birmingham → Long Nuke Road in Northfield, named long before nuclear weapons existed — "Nuke" is a corruption of an Old English place name that nobody can now identify → The Froggery, a slum neighbourhood deliberately erased by Victorian reformers because the name itself stuck to everyone who lived there — now buried under the Bullring and New Street Station → Adderley Street in Bordesley, where in spring 1890 a newspaper printed the name "Small Heath Peaky Blinders" for the first time in history, under railway bridges that are still standing → Warstone Lane Cemetery, where workers describe a woman in 1930s clothing walking through the catacomb walls — and the smell of pear drops, the same scent given off by the potassium cyanide used in the Jewellery Quarter's plating trade → The Garrison Tavern on Garrison Lane, where Cillian Murphy stood before filming began in 2013 — the building sold at auction in 2014 for £183,000 and sat closed for most of the show's six-season run → Jamaica Row, a fossil record of Birmingham's connection to the transatlantic trade, demolished in the 20th century — nobody under 60 in the city recognises the name Subscribe for more hidden corners of Britain you weren't taught in school.
