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After mythologising Birmingham gang warfare during the 1920s in Peaky Blinders, showrunner Steven Knight has headed south to expose the criminal underbelly of 1880s London in his new Disney+ six-parter A Thousand Blows. ‘Victorian London was the capital of the world,’ explains Knight. ‘It was a place where you literally had to fight to survive. It was just a place with a lot of mad stuff going on.’
Inspired by an idea brought to Knight by actor-producers Stephen Graham and Hannah Walters, A Thousand Blows is a vibrantly colourful world dominated by bare-knuckle boxing, opportunistic girl gangs, class warfare and ridiculously natty threads. Here, Knight explains how to make London history hip in six steps.
1. Make it about class
A Thousand Blows centres on Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall), best friends from Jamaica, who arrive in 1880s London and find themselves thrust into the bare-knuckle boxing scene of the criminal underworld. While the pair face racism, the show provides a more progressive view of London as a cultural melting pot, Hezekiah and Alec also finding kindness and acceptance in the local community.
‘The issue in this show isn’t so much gender or race, it’s class,’ says Knight. ‘White women, Black men, Black women, white men – all of them are cold when it’s cold, all of them are hungry when there’s no food. The things that are held in common by people in the East End of London are far greater than the divisions. The division is with the people in the West End, the aristocracy.’
2. Land your punches
When Hezekiah steps through the ropes, he faces the guv’nor of the East End fight world ‘Sugar’ Goodson, played by a hench Stephen Graham. The show is set at the tipping point when bare knuckle boxing was giving way to the more gentlemanly art of pugilism pioneered by the Earl of Lonsdale (Adam Nagaitis). ‘This was a time when in the East End you fought with bare knuckles, and in the West End you increasingly fought with gloves – the class system is symbolised by gloves or no gloves,” says Knight.
The showrunner had concerns about filming the boxing scenes – ‘boxing is really easy to do badly but this is done by the best people, and looks great’ – but ended up having to hold his cast back. ‘Malachi told me he wished he’d been hit so he knew what it felt like.’
3. Mix feminism with flick knives
Hezekiah’s prowess in the ring captures the attention of Mary Carr (The Crown’s Erin Doherty), the leader of a gang of female thieves called The Forty Elephants. Some accounts put the name down to the perps operating out of Elephant & Castle but Knight has a more poetic explanation. ‘They were called elephants because when they stole from Harrods and Selfridges, they would be wearing layers of dresses and coats so they’d waddle out looking like elephants.’ The thieving escapades add a romp element to Knight’s tale, but he acknowledges that ‘it's not all fun and games, because they did have knives and razor blades. They would just show up en masse, cause absolute chaos and steal loads of stuff. They were very much in charge of their own destiny.’
4. Rebuild Victorian London from the ground up
Peaky Blinders famously drew much atmosphere from shooting in real Birmingham locations but for A Thousand Blows, Knight and production designer Tom Burton decided to recreate the East End – both interiors and exteriors – in an abandoned brewery in Mortlake, West London. ‘The scale is amazing,’ says Knight. ‘You can walk down streets, turn corners and go down an alley, and you're still in Victorian London. For a writer it’s such a gift. It should be there permanently.’ But Knight had thoughts beyond his screenplay. ‘It looks so good I started asking, “Can these people build a house for me?”’
5. Throw in some Peaky Blinders-style fashion
Perhaps one unexpected way Peaky Blinders entered the culture was through its fashion; a three-piece suit, grandad shirt and flat cap inspired untold GQ editorials. Expect A Thousand Blows to do the same. Costume designer Maja Meschede’s looks, ranging from Hezekiah’s coat replete with Civil War buttons to his Petra blue waistcoat to his beautiful tailored suit as he becomes more successful, are sure to be replicated on Hoxton’s streets any day now. ‘Men really took trouble with how they looked,’ says Knight. ‘I think there was a sense of self and pride in how one looked then amongst both the working classes and middle classes.’
6. Fill it with London energy
‘What I love about Victorian London is the energy,’ says Knight. If you think hordes speed-walking around the city holding huge Starbucks cups is the height of urban hubbub, it has nothing on the hustle and bustle of the 19th century capital. ‘People ran everywhere,’ says Knight. ‘There would be stores that sold buns. People would throw the money, grab the bun and run because everybody was in such a hurry. I love that energy.’
Is A Thousand Blows based on a true story?
Researching A Thousand Blows, Knight eschewed dusty accounts of Victorian London to create a modern take on historical facts. ‘History books take the facts and present them as if whatever happened was inevitable, whereas reality is more random, abstract, weird and chaotic. I try wherever possible to capture that.’ Scouring newspapers like The London Gazette and chronicles like Mayhew’s London, Knight discovered some gems, particularly around the daily commute. ‘People would walk from Chiswick to Central London and back,’ he marvels. ‘The distances people used to walk for work was just crazy.’ To be fair, it’s a much more reliable – and probably quicker – mode of transport than the Piccadilly Line.
Liberties, of course, are taken with the story but historians Hallie Rubenhold and David Olusoga, who consulted on the show, stress that A Thousand Blows’ grasp on the social history of the 1880s is rock solid – especially in terms of diversity on display and the real-life characters who appear. ‘London was comparatively diverse,’ notes Olusoga. ‘There were people from all over the Empire. Hezekiah Moscow is someone we know very little about [but] the fact that he is now on the verge of being famous through this series, I think that is astonishing.’
Similarly, Mary Carr and her gang, The Forty Elephants, are straight from the history books. ‘They got their name from a pub in Lambeth called the Elephant and Castle,’ says Rubenhold. ‘That women stepped out of the roles we expected to find them in, and were involved in organised crime in this era, is great to share with the audience.’
A Thousand Blows launches on Feb 21 on Disney+ and Hulu
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