Gangs of London

Gangs of London is what happens when the director of The Raid gets a TV budget and decides to skip the fat. Brutal, operatic, gorgeously shot. And absolutely unbothered by the gentler conventions of British crime drama. If you came for tea and tension, you're in the wrong taxi.

🎬 Premise

Created by Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery for Sky Atlantic in 2020, Gangs of London is set in a contemporary version of London that looks a lot like the one on the map, except it's quietly run by a coalition of crime factions (Welsh, Albanian, Pakistani, Nigerian, Kurdish, Danish) who have stopped competing openly and are dividing the city between them. Their fragile peace is held together by one man: Finn Wallace, the Irish-Welsh kingpin who has brokered every deal that matters.

When Finn is killed in the first episode, the vacuum at the top of the hierarchy detonates everything. His son Sean takes the throne angry and unprepared. A mysterious newcomer, Elliot Finch, begins climbing through the Wallace organisation for reasons of his own. The gangs themselves start tearing at the seams of the city, some for love, some for profit, most out of sheer reflex.

What starts as a who-dunnit becomes a war story, and then something bigger: a study of how global capital, not men with guns, really runs modern London.

🎭 Cast

• Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as Elliot Finch, the series' haunted, athletically terrifying centre of gravity. A performance that announced Dirisu as one of the most watchable leading men working in the UK
• Joe Cole as Sean Wallace, trying to fill his father's shoes while barely holding himself together
• Colm Meaney as Finn Wallace, the patriarch whose death reshapes the map
• Michelle Fairley as Marian Wallace, Finn's widow and the most strategically dangerous person in the family
• Lucian Msamati as Ed Dumani, the Wallaces' oldest ally and a man whose loyalties are never simple
• Paapa Essiedu as Alex Dumani, Ed's Oxford-educated son, caught between cultures and legacies
• Narges Rashidi as Lale, a Kurdish freedom-fighter turned drug-runner funding a cause back home
• Brian Vernel as Billy Wallace, the fragile younger Wallace brother whose unraveling is the show's emotional spine
• Orli Shuka as Luan Dushaj, the Albanian faction's patriarch and one of the show's most magnetic supporting turns

🎨 Style & Atmosphere

Gareth Evans is best known for the Indonesian martial-arts masterpiece The Raid, and he brings that same obsession with physical craft to television. The action set pieces in Gangs of London are, frankly, in their own category. Hand-to-hand fights are staged with the clarity and choreography of dance, shot in long, confident takes that let you see the hit landing. If you've read any think-piece about action choreography on TV in the last five years, Gangs of London is almost certainly somewhere in the citations.

The most kinetic, uncompromising action in British television history. A show that refuses to look away when other crime dramas would cut.

But Evans is also a visual stylist. The series leans into painterly, colour-graded compositions that wouldn't look out of place in a Denis Villeneuve film. Rooftops at dusk. Warehouses lit like cathedrals. Blood on marble. You can screenshot this show at any given moment and hang the frame on a wall.

🧠 Themes

Underneath the spectacle, Gangs of London is deeply interested in London as a laundering machine. The way dirty capital, wherever it comes from, eventually needs to buy property, schools and political access in a Western capital to become clean. The show's villains are not always the ones with guns. Some of them are the ones in pinstripes approving the paperwork.

It also grapples with diaspora. Almost every faction in the show is rooted in a real geopolitical conflict (Kurdistan, the Balkans, Nigeria, Pakistan), and Gangs of London takes the time to show why people ended up in this city, what they sent home, and what they left behind. That's unusually ambitious for a crime drama.

📈 Reception

Gangs of London was Sky's biggest original series launch since the previous record-holder at the time, and it became an international hit through AMC's US distribution in 2020. It has since expanded across further seasons: a second series aired in 2022, a third in 2025, with a fourth confirmed. The action set pieces earned it a small but fanatical following among filmmakers, and it has been cited as an influence on streaming action output ever since. Critically, it has been compared to Peaky Blinders for its visual ambition and to The Shield for its moral volatility.

A note on the cast: Sope Dirisu has since become one of the most in-demand actors of his generation, Paapa Essiedu has built a parallel career in prestige drama, and Michelle Fairley (yes, that one from Game of Thrones) delivers some of the best work of her career here.

🏆 Why It Works

Gangs of London works because it is relentlessly, specifically good at the thing it came to do. The action is better than it needs to be. The photography lands at a level the story doesn't require. The ensemble runs deeper than a show this pulpy has any right to have. If you enjoy crime drama that knows how to move, this is one of the highest-octane things on television, and, underneath all of it, a real argument about what a modern global city actually is.

Start from episode one. The first 20 minutes will tell you whether this show is for you.