Steven Knight is probably Britain’s most prolific television creator, with Rogue Heroes, A Thousand Blows, Great Expectations, and This Town among his most recent shows, but he remains best known as the man behind the phenomenal Peaky Blinders.
Good news, then, that his latest, House of Guinness, has more than a little of that show’s DNA. Based on the true lives of the great Irish brewery dynasty, it focuses on the year 1868 and the transition to a new generation. While the plot is Succession meets Downton Abbey, the style is all Peaky Blinders.
Ben Blackall/Netflix
There are the same bold plans and dirty deeds, lots of chewy accents, plenty of sexual tension and even the trademark atmospheric rock soundtrack. There’s also a similar cast of big characters, led by Anthony Boyle, Louis Partridge, and Emily Fairn as the core Guinness trio of Arthur, Edward and Anne, but with James Norton taking the Cillian Murphy role as brewery foreman and family fixer Sean Rafferty.
The House of Guinness also shares an industrial backdrop and a strong sense of period and place, moving from grimy backstreets to gilded ballrooms, from the towering mansions of the haves to the crowded hovels of the have-nots. And, as with Peaky Blinders, this was created through a combination of clever location hunting and reconstruction. Here’s our guide to how it was done.
Is House of Guinness filmed in Dublin?
Although it’s undoubtedly a Dublin story, House of Guinness didn’t film in Dublin at all. The primary reason for this is that Dublin has undergone significant changes since the mid-19th century, when the story is set. Instead, the team used period-suitable buildings in the north of England, just as showrunner and writer Steven Knight did on Peaky Blinders. “The fact is that Dublin now looks less like Dublin in 1868 than other areas do,” explained Knight. “Peaky wasn’t filmed in Birmingham, because Birmingham didn’t look like Birmingham in the 20s anymore.” While the real-life Guinness Brewery and the family’s home Iveagh House are still standing, they are now busy places of work, and it was easier to recreate them in the historic parts of Liverpool and Manchester. As director Tom Shankland tells it, “There are a lot of Georgian-era streets and grand buildings in Liverpool that were just right for us. You’re like, ‘That’s Iveagh House!’ in a way that we could never have achieved at [Dublin’s] St. Stephen’s Green.”
