This Time It’s Personnel (Oddjobs, #2)

by Heide Goody

Birmingham was undergoing a transformation. It always had been, and it always would be. Buildings came down. Buildings went up. Traffic was diverted this way and then that… The city was a constantly shifting maze and its million or so inhabitants negotiated each new surprise with the tolerance of philosophical rats. The three squares at the city’s civic heart, Victoria Square, Chamberlain Square and Centenary Square were virtually adjacent. However, in years gone by, pedestrians could only go from Chamberlain Square to Centenary Square through a shopping arcade that ran beneath the inverted concrete ziggurat of Birmingham Central Library. Now the huge, shiny and rarely open Library of Birmingham dominated Centenary Square. The original Central Library was a pile of rubble in Chamberlain Square, the three squares were reduced to two and anyone wishing to walk from Victoria to Centenary would need a thorough grasp of local geography, some of it subterranean.