The film's title is a direct reference to a scene where the character Combo explains his nationalist views using the phrase "this is England" during his speech.

In July 1983, Shaun Fields is a troubled 12-year-old boy living with his widowed mother Cynthia in an unspecified area in the East Midlands.

Shaun bonds closely with Woody, viewing him as a brother figure, and his girlfriend Lorraine "Lol" Jenkins, who takes a motherly role towards him.

During a party one night, the group is ambushed by a bald, tattooed, moustachioed, machete-wielding man, who is then attacked by Andrew "Combo" Gascoigne, a first-wave skinhead.

Combo, a charismatic but unstable man with sociopathic tendencies, expresses English nationalist and racist views, alienating Woody, Lol, Kes, and offending Milky.

An enraged Combo enters a frenzied state and brutally beats Milky unconscious, while Banjo holds down Shaun, and Meggy watches on in horror.

An angry Combo violently throws Shaun out of his flat after he verbally defends Milky, then slams the door hard.

Much of the film was shot in residential areas of Nottingham, including St Ann's, Lenton, and The Meadows, with one section featuring abandoned houses at RAF Newton, a former airbase close to Bingham, Nottinghamshire.

[4] The opening fight was filmed at Wilsthorpe Business and Enterprise College, a secondary school in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, close to the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire boundary.

Although much of the film was shot on location in Nottingham, a number of scenes portray the town's docks, which precludes this inland city being the setting for the action.

The website's critical consensus reads, "A moving coming-of-age tale that captures the despair among England's working-class youth in the 1980s".