The story that made me want to write Peaky Blinders came from my dad. When he was about eight he had to deliver a note to the Sheldons, the real Peaky Blinders. He was terrified of them and had to run barefoot through the streets. When the door opened, smoke wafted out and there were nine men round a table, immaculately dressed – ties, shoes polished, hats, guns – and the table piled with money, but they were drinking beer out of jam jars, because they wouldn’t spend money on glasses or cups. The image of a little kid looking on made me want to write about that whole era.

My mum and dad grew up in Small Heath in Birmingham in the 1920s. Mum was a runner for illegal bookmakers when she was nine or 10; they often used children, who aroused less suspicion. She used to walk down the street with a washing basket and people would wrap their bet – sixpence or whatever – in a piece of paper with the horse’s name and their code name on it, and drop it in the basket when she walked past, because there would be policemen watching.

The history books are wrong! They say the Peakies had died out by the 1890s but they hadn’t. That local Birmingham gang was the Sheldons – which I changed to the Shelbys for the programme – and in the 1920s that family was still known as the Peaky Blinders.

The Peaky Blinders will always be in Brum, but in the new series the world comes to Birmingham. There was a pull towards moving west, to prohibition and gangsters and Al Capone, but I’ve gone east instead, and in this series they are in business with exiled Russian aristocrats conspiring against the Bolsheviks – a plot line that is based on real events in 1924.

When my mum was growing up, all you could hear, 24 hours a day, was bang-bang, the thump of the steam hammers and the smell and the smoke – the air was green sometimes. I wanted to keep all that in the programme but also tell the story as it was told to me as a kid, so everything is bigger – the horses are massive, the Garrison, a real pub and it’s terrible, but in the memory it is a huge saloon. It’s imagining how Birmingham looked then – it was smokey, it was dark, it was noisy, a lot of flames. It was like hell.

Some of my family’s old stories were too horrific to put in the programme. There was a bloke who used to go around the pubs in Small Heath with a rat in a cage. He’d put his head in the cage and fight the rat with his mouth, and kill it and people would give him money. It was a hard, hard place.

The Black Country Living Museum looks like the memories of my parents’ Birmingham, even though it’s not quite in Brum. We film quite a lot there, it’s our base for the series. There are lots of little back streets and original workshops which are still working, so it’s an amazing place to visit.

Manchester’s history is cotton and wool. Birmingham’s is iron and steel. Manchester makes a lot more noise, but we have a better story to tell. Iron and steel are more interesting – from them came factories, mass production, steam power … you name it, it started there. They invented the modern world, basically.

I’m working on a scheme to build a big film studio in Birmingham, called Mercian – from the Anglo-Saxon Midlands kingdom –, with the city council, where we can develop large-scale productions. I was up there yesterday having a meeting, and some people from Paramount came over. because there is a shortage of space in this country, and I want that to happen in Birmingham sooner rather than later.

I’d love the story of the Lunar Men, the likes of James Watt, Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood, who met in Soho House in Handsworth every full moon (because it was safe to walk home then) to swap ideas on science, technology and changing the world. They were sending spies from Germany, France and all over to try to find out what they were up to, because everything was being invented in the Midlands. Soho House is still going and well worth a visit.

It’s typical of Brum that the modern world was invented in Handsworth and nobody knows about it. I am trying to start a “Make it in Birmingham” campaign, to get high-tech industries – film, animation, virtual reality, gaming – all into one place, a place where people make things, which is what Birmingham has always been.

Spaghetti Junction is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen at night. When we made Locke [starring Tom Hardy], about a man driving from Birmingham to London, I just said to the director of photography: “Can we film it so it looks like a painting?” You just see all the red lights, white lights and flashing blue lights going over this ribbon. It’s gorgeous, and shows that – when looked at it in a certain way – something that’s considered to be conventionally ugly is actually beautiful. That’s Birmingham.

In the States a lot of Hispanic and black audiences are gravitating towards Peaky Blinders. A mate of went into a bar in Santa Monica and sent me a photo of four blokes dressed as Peakies – they meet every week for a Peaky Blinders evening. In London there are clubs that do Peakies nights – I am loving that all this happening. We’re in the early stages of do a clothing range, too, called Garrison [the name of the pub in the series], producing clothes in the Peaky style.

If you’re in Brum, go the Digbeth area, adjacent to the city centre. It’s transforming before our eyes. It used to be the industrial heart of Birmingham, full of Victorian factories, a lot like Tribeca in New York (and was probably built in the same era by the same people) and is becoming one of the city’s main creative centres. There’s lots going on at the Custard Factory, which has studio space, boutiques and vintage shops, and the Spotted Dog is a great Digbeth pub.

If you want an authentic Peaky Blinders-era pub, try the Bartons Arms in Aston. If you want posh, Michelin-starred Simpsons restaurant is hard to beat, and the Hotel du Vin serves wonderful food and wine, too.

I’m a big Birmingham City supporter and seeing the fans dressed as Peaky Blinders is one of my proudest moments. It was the last game of the season and we had to draw to avoid relegation, and everyone was dressed as Peakies, and then we score in the last minute of injury time and stay up, and everyone is crying and everybody’s got their caps on … It was brilliant!

• The third series of Peaky Blinders starts on BBC2 on Thursday 5 May