Tonight’s speaker, Corinne Brazier, is Heritage Manager at the West Midlands Police Museum. Her talk explores the true, gritty history of late-Victorian and early 20th-century Birmingham gangs using archival records, early mugshots, and real criminal case files. Corinne contrasts the BBC-TV drama Peaky Blinders with actual historical data on Birmingham's street ruffians and racecourse racketeers. She will showcase some of the earliest prisoner photographs dating back to the 1890s from the Steelhouse Lane Lock-Up records and highlight some real-life career criminals, gamblers and cop-killers who ended up detained there.

Photo: The Steelhouse Lane Lock-up was a Victorian cell block on Steelhouse Lane, Birmingham, operational from 1891 until 2016, after which it became the home of the West Midlands Police Museum. Photo © Gilbert911