Victoria Square: Birmingham Travel Guide (4.7★)

Stone, bronze and a reclining giantess

Victoria Square opens out where New Street climbs and runs out of shops. The ground slopes in terraced steps, and at the top a huge bronze woman reclines in a basin. That is Dhruva Mistry’s The River, installed in 1993 when the square was pedestrianised. Birmingham promptly named it the Floozie in the Jacuzzi.

Below her, Mistry’s two Guardians sit like sphinxes beside the steps. Queen Victoria stands on her plinth in Thomas Brock’s statue. The square took her name in 1901, the year she died.

The buildings around the edge

Two facades set the scale here:

• The Council House (1879): honey-coloured stone, a pediment mosaic and a clock tower locals call Big Brum.
• Birmingham Town Hall (opened 1834): a Roman temple of Anglesey marble, modelled on the Temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome. It is still a working concert venue.
• Chamberlain Square, just past the Council House, with the Joseph Chamberlain Memorial and the newer Paradise development.

Stand at the Town Hall’s columns and look back down New Street. You can see how the square works as a stage at the end of the city’s main shopping run. Most visitors look at the statue and miss that view.

Getting there and timing

Victoria Square is a public space, open 24 hours, with no gate or ticket.

• Tram: the Town Hall stop on the West Midlands Metro is at the square’s edge.
• Rail: Birmingham New Street is a short uphill walk along New Street. Snow Hill and Moor Street are both walkable too.
• Time needed: 20–40 minutes for the square alone. Allow longer if you add Chamberlain Square and the Jewellery Quarter beyond.

Early mornings feel spacious, before the shops on New Street open and foot traffic builds. After dark the Council House and Town Hall are floodlit, and the sandstone and marble look very different. In late autumn and December, Birmingham’s Christmas market has traditionally spread through this part of the centre. Check the city’s events listings for the current layout.

Reading the square like a Brummie

Use the nicknames. Ask for “the Floozie” and anyone will point you to The River. “Big Brum” means the Council House clock. Locals still trade the old jokes about the sculpture, including the rhyming ones. That kind of humour is part of how the city talks about its public art.

Practical notes:

• Check the Town Hall programme before you come. A lunchtime organ recital or an evening concert gets you inside a building that most people only photograph.
• Don’t treat the basin as a paddling pool. The sculpture has been altered and repaired over the years, and climbing on it is discouraged.
• Use the steps as seating, the way office workers do with a sandwich. There are few benches, and the terraces are the obvious place to sit.
• Combine it on foot: the Floozie, then Chamberlain Square, then Colmore Row’s Victorian banks, then St Philip’s Cathedral, all within a few minutes.

Even though it sits in the middle of the city, few people make the square a destination. Most hurry through on the way to New Street. Stop at the top of the steps and you get the city’s best set piece of civic architecture with little competition for the view.