Peaky Blinders mostly filmed its 1919 Birmingham on Liverpool's Powis Street, the Worth Valley Railway and Bradford's Little Germany. Tommy Shelby's gang rules Small Heath.
The route follows the story from Small Heath, through the Liverpool street that played Watery Lane, a Yorkshire railway, Aunt Polly's village and the Black Country, to Bradford's warehouses, Tommy's country house and the beach where series 4 ends. Most pins mark stand-ins, labelled as such.
Amelia Earhart's last flight, 1937: from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae in New Guinea and Howland Island, which she never reached, and on to Nikumaroro, where one theory says she came down. A crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal made it one of history's great mysteries.
The route follows both attempts, from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae and Howland Island, and ends at Nikumaroro, where one theory says she and her navigator came down. That final stop is only a hypothesis.
A search for the Land of Cinnamon turned into the first descent of the Amazon from the Andes to the sea. Francisco de Orellana, with the friar Gaspar de Carvajal as chronicler, followed unmapped rivers, fought off warriors on the banks and gave the river the name it still carries.
The route runs from Quito to the Napo, the Rio Negro, the Amazon's mouth and the pearl island of Cubagua. River stops are approximate, and dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar still in use then.
In August 1803 two small Russian sloops sailed from Kronstadt on the first Russian voyage round the world. Adam Johann von Krusenstern led the expedition on the Nadezhda, and Yuri Lisyansky captained the Neva; the Neva was back almost three years later.
This route follows seven turning points, from the Marquesas and Kamchatka to the Tlingit fort at Sitka, the closed door of Nagasaki and the tea trade at Canton. The two ships often sailed apart, so the stops are markers, not one line. Day dates follow the main source, which gives the outward voyage in the modern (New Style) calendar; Russian logs of the time used the Old Style, so the homecoming in 1806 is given by season only. Pins mark towns and bays, not exact anchorages.
Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas, 1799–1804: Cumaná in Venezuela, the electric eels of Calabozo, Chimborazo in Ecuador, Callao in Peru, the silver mine at Guanajuato and Jefferson's White House. He and Aimé Bonpland spent five years measuring, collecting and climbing.
This route follows eight stops from the landing at Cumaná to Washington in 1804. Several pins are approximate because the sources name a region or river rather than one spot.
Miguel Hidalgo's revolt began Mexico's war of independence in Dolores on 16 September 1810. The route runs from the conspirators' house in Querétaro through the Alhóndiga at Guanajuato and the near-miss at Mexico City to the execution in Chihuahua.
The route follows it from the plot in Querétaro and the Cry of Dolores through the storming of the Alhóndiga in Guanajuato, the near-miss at Mexico City and the defeat at Calderón Bridge, to the ambush in Coahuila and the execution in Chihuahua. Violence is part of the story and is named plainly.
In the autumn of 1600 two armies met at Sekigahara to decide who would hold power after Toyotomi Hideyoshi. One day in the fog gave Tokugawa Ieyasu a decisive victory and put him on the road to the shogunate.
The route follows the campaign from the siege of Fushimi to the castles of Mino, the field of Sekigahara, the fall of Mitsunari's Sawayama and his burial in Kyoto, and ends at Edo Castle in 1603. Dates inside Japan's old calendar are labelled as such.
Jules Verne sends a Czar's courier 3,400 miles across Russia: from a night fête in Moscow, through the Urals and the Tartar invasion, to besieged Irkutsk. Michael Strogoff carries one letter, a false name and a promise to the Czar.
The route follows the book from the Kremlin through Nizhny Novgorod, the Urals, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Lake Baikal to Irkutsk. Verne names towns rather than buildings, so every pin is approximate.
Qin Shi Huang's China: his capital Xianyang, Mount Tai, where he proclaimed the empire's unity, the Lingqu Canal near Guilin, and his tomb at Mount Li with the Terracotta Army. He unified the warring states in 221 BC; some of what is told about him is legend.
This route visits seven places tied to him, from Xianyang to the Terracotta Army. Stops marked as legend or speculative (the elixir quest on Zhifu Island, the lost course of the Qin wall) are kept apart from sites that archaeology has confirmed.
Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, but Hong Kong was the city that shaped him: a Nathan Road childhood, Wing Chun lessons with Ip Man, and the film studios that made him a star. This route follows his documented life and the places where his films and legacy meet.
It runs from a Kowloon flat and school days, through a surviving Enter the Dragon location and the hospital where he died, to the statue and museum that remember him. Where accounts differ, the stop says so.
Avatar's floating Hallelujah Mountains draw on Wulingyuan and Tianzi Mountain in Hunan, and on Huangshan, though the film was made largely on a Los Angeles stage in Playa Vista. Cameron named Huangshan, Hunan netizens insisted on Zhangjiajie, and the only walkable Pandora is at Florida's Animal Kingdom.
Expect inspiration rather than filming locations: the film was made largely on stages, so the Chinese pins are stand-ins and credited influences.
Water Margin follows 108 spirits freed from a sealed hall on Longhu Mountain as they become the outlaws of Liangshan Marsh, with stops at Mount Wutai and the Xunyang Tower. A real Song Jiang appears in the Song History; the marsh silted up centuries ago.
Each stop is a scene from the novel, set beside what is documented: a real Song Jiang appears in the Song History, and the real Liangshan Marsh silted up centuries ago. Places tied to the story only by later tradition are marked.
Walking the island of Shikoku from temple to temple, in the footsteps of the monk Kūkai, is one of Japan's oldest pilgrimages.
This route visits seven of the 88 temples, from Temple 1 in Tokushima to the finish at Temple 88, passing the four provinces, Kūkai's birthplace and the highest temple. The legends here are temple tradition, not proven history.
Japan's Kumano Kodō runs from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu to Kumano Hongū Taisha, then by boat to Shingū and on to Nachi's stone steps and falls. For over a thousand years emperors, samurai and commoners walked these trails to the three grand shrines; Go-Shirakawa made the trip 34 times.
This route follows the Nakahechi from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu and Hongū, by river to Shingū, then to Nachi's stone steps and waterfall. Some stops are pinned to the area rather than a surveyed spot.
On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; three days later, another on Nagasaki. This route follows the two days on the ground, from the bridge that served as the aiming point to the places that survived or were rebuilt.
It starts in Hiroshima at Aioi Bridge, the hypocenter and the Dome, then moves to Nagasaki's hypocenter, cathedral and shrine, and ends with the two museums and parks built in 1955. Death tolls are estimates and are given as the ranges researchers publish.
Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel follows Prince Genji from the capital to exile on the Suma shore and, in its last ten chapters, to Uji. Many of its places are real shrines and temples that visitors can still enter.
The route runs by chapter, from Kitayama to Uji, then to the temples tied to the author. Chapters are fiction; the Ishiyama-dera writing story is tradition, and Rozan-ji is one scholar's identification.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games send scavengers called stalkers through the Zone, a radioactive wasteland built from the real Chernobyl exclusion zone. The developers copied bridges, railways and buildings from photographs and visits, then bent the geography for gameplay.
This route goes from the edge of the Zone to the reactor, setting each game location beside its real counterpart. The real zone is restricted and trespassers are prosecuted, so this is a map to read, not a trip to plan.
Twenty years after a nuclear war, the survivors of Moscow live in the Metro, and a young man named Artyom must carry a warning from his home station across the whole network. The novel and the game built on it use real station names, so you can follow Artyom's trip on an ordinary city map.
The route runs from VDNKh in the north through Kitay-gorod, Paveletskaya and Kievskaya to the Ostankino Tower. The book and the game differ in places; where they do, the text says so. The library stop is a likely match, not a named place.
In 1961 Yuri Gagarin trained at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield, launched from Baikonur and came down near Engels. Less than two hours in space made the pilot a worldwide celebrity; his capsule is kept in a museum in Korolev City.
This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
Takumi Fujiwara delivers tofu every morning in his father's old Toyota AE86, and without knowing it he becomes the fastest downhill driver in Gunma. Shuichi Shigeno's street racing manga sends him against rival teams from mountain after mountain.
Some names are fictionalized, but all of the locations in the series are based on actual places in Japan. The route follows them from Mount Haruna, the real Akina, to Akagi, Myōgi and Irohazaka, then returns to the lake and to the museum that keeps the tofu shop's storefront.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
Assassin's Creed (2007) recreates the Holy Land of 1191: Masyaf, Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem, with Solomon's Temple and Richard's camp at Arsuf. Altaïr loses his rank after a botched mission and wins it back one target at a time: nine men in three cities, all secretly Templars.
The route follows the story from the Temple in Jerusalem to the Assassins' fortress of Masyaf, through Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem, to a duel in King Richard's camp. The game's cities are rebuilt for play, so every pin marks the real place the scene is anchored to.
The Old English poem Beowulf is set in Denmark and Sweden, and a surprising number of its kings, battles and halls turn up in Scandinavian sources and in the ground. Follow the hero from his Geatish homeland to Hrothgar's hall, then to the raid in Frisia, the royal mounds at Uppsala, and the English ship burial and library shelf where the poem survived.
Most identifications here are traditional rather than proven, and the pins say so.
