The BBC decided in March 1983 that it needed a popular twice-weekly drama to rival ITV's Coronation Street, and tasked producer Julia Smith and script editor Tony Holland, who had previously worked together on Z-Cars, with creating it.

Granada Television gave Julia Smith unrestricted access to the Coronation Street production for a month so she could learn how a continuing drama was produced.

The show went through several working titles including Square Dance, Round the Square, Round the Houses, London Pride and East 8 (referencing the E8 Hackney postcode), before Julia Smith coined the name 'Eastenders' after months of asking theatrical agents if they had 'any real East Enders' on their books; she capitalised the second 'e' because she felt the word looked ugly and was hard to say otherwise.

The fictional postcode E20 was invented instead of using the real E8 postcode after casting agents kept mistakenly thinking the show was to be called 'Estate'.

Smith and Holland created the show's 23 initial characters in just 14 days while on holiday in Playa de los Pocillos, Lanzarote.

Tony Holland based the Beale and Fowler family on his own relatives, naming characters like Lou Beale, Pete Beale and Pauline Fowler after his mother's sister Lou, who had married a man named Albert Beale and had children Peter and Pauline.

The character of Ethel Skinner was inspired by an old woman Julia Smith met in a pub who had ill-fitting false teeth and held a Yorkshire Terrier in one hand and a pint of Guinness in the other.

A 24th character, racist thug Nick Cotton, was added to the lineup specifically because the writers felt none of their other 23 characters were wicked enough to have committed the show's opening murder of Reg Cox.

The show's title sequence visuals, created by Alan Jeapes, were made by piecing together roughly 800 aerial photographs taken from an aircraft flying over the East End of London at 1,000 feet; the theme music was composed by Simon May.

The name Walford combines Walthamstow and Stratford, the areas of Greater London where creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland were born, and is also the name of a street in Dalston where Tony Holland lived.

The Queen Vic pub set was deliberately burnt down in a 2010 storyline to allow the real set to be rebuilt ahead of the show's move to high-definition broadcasting on Christmas Day 2010.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when filming resumed in June 2020 under social distancing measures, cast members were required to do their own hair and make-up instead of using make-up artists.

The 1986 Christmas Day episode of EastEnders was watched by more than 30 million viewers, making it the most-watched programme in UK television history.

The 2010 baby swap storyline attracted more than 6,000 complaints from viewers.