Stephen Daly (production designer)

What makes up a production design team?

We have an art department made up of the art director, an assistant art director, a graphics team, a set decorator and a crew of buyers who are constantly out looking, buying and renting props. We also have our prop master with his crew, a construction manager with his crew of carpenters, painters and plasterers. It’s a pretty big production team that all come together.

Were there any key points or themes given to you for reference for the look of series four?

We’ve always talked about Once Upon A Time In America (1984), the Sergio Leone movie. We always want to push it time-wise and show that things are moving on and we’re now in 1926. Series one started in 1919. Things happened very fast back then. Like modern times, fashions change quickly. A lot of colour is important. Wallpapers and furnishing will be more colourful and patterned compared to what we’ve seen previously.

What challenges come from recreating 1920s Birmingham in 2017?

We’d look for anything from mid-Victorian up to the 1920s. Obviously, people back then didn’t live in brand new houses. They lived in places that dated back to the 1860s. We also have to give a nod to what is already been established on Peaky Blinders. Series one and two are very dirty and grimy so we have to look for those kinds of locations but even then there are still a lot of modern aspects like signage, lighting, pipes and modern technology that we need to be aware of. A huge part of our job is removing and fixing those things, like little electrical switches or graffiti, you name it.

What did you first look for when you received your Peaky Blinders scripts?

When we read a script we break it down into the various sets needed for the series. We know that there’ll be certain sets that we already have from last year, like the interior of the betting shop or Tommy’s office, which we will need to reconstruct. We then look to the new sets required for this particular story. With shooting on location across Birmingham, Liverpool, Bradford and Manchester we decided on the old Granada Studios as our main base of operation where we have the space to build the interior sets.

What was the appeal of the Manchester Fire Station location for your set builds?

We came across the old Fire Station in Manchester, which fitted so well with the world of the Peaky Blinders, particularly for the big shoot-out scenes. We really utilised this location for a multitude of sets, as the space was so vast. It was the perfect location. It’s a listed building so we had to be careful and look after the building with any construction elements having to be self-supporting. As well as building Reilly’s Gym and tenement flats within the space, we also added to the interior courtyard to create a street scene with a coal merchant’s, a builder’s yard, a fruit and veg seller and a bicycle shop. We brought in vehicles and laid grit to give a road surface to the whole place. It was a full on dress for us. What we had in the Fire Station was the bones of an amazing space. The aging on the brick was perfect as was the quality of the wood and the paint finishes, all we needed to do was add to it. It’s the kind of place which you immediately know you’re going to be able to film in. We did two of the five-day shoot-out storyboard sequence there and it looked amazing. Then while we are striking this location, we were already getting the next set ready and the next, and the next!

We just knew that the Fire Station would give us so much in terms of available space. It has been a gold mine of a location. When we looked at the old ambulance bay, which just has rows and rows of doors in a big, long blue-coloured room we knew that this would work well for the Reilly’s Gym set.

The script required a large factory for the Shelbys to work out of. How did you go about designing this location?

We knew from the script that we needed factory offices for the Shelbys. We walked into this old derelict printing works in Bradford and we were just blown away with the possibilities. The building was on three different levels, which worked really well for the scripted scenes. There were broken floorboards and windows; it was a complete mess. We just slowly but surely worked away at it with painting and construction crews and I think it looked pretty good by the end. I was particularly pleased with the way the boardroom turned out. It’s really rich and has so many different layers to it. I think the location will really shine when you see it on screen.