Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The old banana warehouse on the Digbeth stretch of the Grand Union canal was derelict when Steven Knight stepped in. “Blackberry bushes were growing all around,” says the screenwriter and filmmaker, who has made it his mission to rewrite the script for this rundown patch of post-industrial midlands on the fringe of Birmingham’s city centre.He has turned a building where crickets were once bred for pet food into the headquarters of his new multimillion-pound complex of film, TV and music studios named Digbeth Loc, which opened last year. The surroundings are gritty, but imagined worlds lie just beyond.Knight, whose default expression is a mischievous twinkle, is something of a rarity in radiating excitement about Britain’s future. He has a record of reviving forgotten pasts, exemplified by his popularisation of the real-life Peaky Blinders in a massively popular drama series. The mob who patrolled the smoggy banks of the nearby canal in the early 20th century have captivated global TV audiences in the 21st.“I am a natural optimist. I must be as I support the Blues,” he says, referring to the travails of Birmingham City football club. Knight, who speaks with a mild Brummie twang, is dressed in black boots and jeans with a short overcoat fresh from a new Peaky-inspired clothing range. For a man with seven children who, when we met, was also juggling the film version of Peaky Blinders (to be released later this year) and another TV series A Thousand Blows (now streaming on Disney+), he is remarkably laid-back. While some might see only waterside property potential in the urban badlands we survey, Knight, who wears his passion for his hometown on his sleeve, sees much more. For all the shopping trolleys that clog it now, the canal, which runs 140 miles south to London, was “the precursor to the internet” he says enthusiastically. A derelict Victorian-era red brick building, stranded between demolished blocks, will soon become a hotel.Within the 19 acres that Knight is developing piecemeal, he envisages a new chapter of productivity, catalysed by the creative community gravitating here and, he hopes, mingling with local entrepreneurs. Their businesses range from tech start-ups to microdistilleries. Where Bird’s once made custard, today there is a coding school.“This is a place where things were made. There was coal and heat and people hammering metal,” Knight says, as we stroll past the vast Fellows Morton & Clayton warehouse, one end of which is curved in the shape of a narrowboat. “What I want to do is plant a new industry here, not one that lands like a spaceship and is surrounded by barbed wire. One that is part of the community.”When we meet, Knight has recently wrapped filming on the forthcoming Peaky Blinders movie. A gypsy caravan marooned in a 20,000 sq ft warehouse is all that remains of the set. The TV series, whose sixth season aired in 2022, follows the fictionalised Shelby crime family’s rise after the first world war. The production of the film in Birmingham will chart the family’s evolution from the onset of the second world war and marks a reboot for Britain’s second-largest city. Much of the TV series was shot in Liverpool and other parts of the UK’s North West. Since the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham closed in 2005, TV, like heavy industry before it, had abandoned the city.“Now, we’ve got loads of people who want to come and shoot here,” says Knight. The BBC’s MasterChef series has moved in, as has legendary Birmingham band UB40. As I arrive at Knight’s offices, a top special-effects team is just leaving after a meeting to consider relocating from Bristol.For Birmingham, centre of the UK’s once-thriving car industry, the success of ventures such as Knight’s are critical in sustaining the city’s regeneration. For Knight, the project is personal. His father was a blacksmith in a Digbeth workshop, “shoeing police horses, fixing things made of metal. Mostly it was a den of iniquity where stolen goods would disappear and reappear.” He and his six siblings would sometimes get to choose between school or working with their dad. “I remember as a kid meeting the people in the scrap metal yards, and I just loved it. I wanted to do something here as a consequence,” he says.The screenplays Knight has written have bubbled up from family lore: from his grandad who fought at the Somme, from his dad who was once sent to deliver a message to the real-life equivalent of the Shelby family firm.“The door opens, and the room is filled with cigarette smoke and smells of whisky,” his dad told him. “Around the table the men were all immaculately dressed, shoes shined, all ex-soldiers with guns and razor blades. The table was covered in coins in a place where nobody had money. Yet they were drinking out of jam jars.”These chapters in British history, he says, are mostly either forgotten or told from the top down. But Knight puts the experiences of the working class in the foreground, weaving the currents of history — communism, the IRA, Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts and the 1926 general strike — into the lives of the Peaky Blinders. “Americans have been able to mythologise their history. Think how they turned 19th-century agricultural labourers into cowboys. We don’t do that so well,” he says. The Shelbys’ story has, however, resonated worldwide. The show has contributed to a 50 per cent surge in visitors from the US to Birmingham over the past decade, according to the West Midlands Growth Company, a strategic development agency based in the region. Knight was contacted by Snoop Dogg, the LA rapper, who “just started talking about how Peaky Blinders reminded him of how he got involved in gang culture”. Knight is mostly sanguine about film and television in the UK. But he laments diminished funding for the arts. He sees years of cuts as short-sighted, given that “we are really good at making film and TV”. He also resents the battering that the BBC has received from politicians, describing the state broadcaster as the “media university in Britain” and one of the country’s proudest exports. In tribute, he hopes that Digbeth Loc will become as much of a creative melting pot. After a long stroll through the city, we come to what used to be “one of the most dangerous pubs in Birmingham”. The Forge Tavern lost its licence in 2017 after a mass brawl in which one man died. The pub has now reopened as a Cuban bar, whose landlord is unbolting the door as we pass. Over pints, Knight muses on Birmingham’s role pushing technological progress. He is fascinated by the 18th-century “lunar men”, a club of Birmingham entrepreneurs and scientists who helped launch the industrial revolution, meeting only when the moon was full to avoid being mugged on their way home. This belief in a better future created by rational human beings was “blown to hell” by the first world war, Knight says. “There’s a kind of disillusionment postwar that we probably haven’t quite recovered from even now.”He draws hope from our surroundings. Just a few hundred yards away, colossal works are ongoing at the prospective HS2 terminal. After reversals and the truncation of its northern half, the line will eventually bring high-speed trains from London to the doors of Digbeth Loc in less than 50 minutes.“Human beings make one mistake after another, keep failing and going wrong,” says Knight. “Then at the end of it,” he adds, gesturing to the viaduct under construction that will carry trains into the new terminal, “there’s this thing in the sky carrying a train that’s doing 160 miles an hour.” William Wallis is the FT’s UK correspondentFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
