The square is named for Joseph Chamberlain, mayor of Birmingham from 1873 to 1876, the man who municipalised the city's gas, water, and sewerage and put a generation of Victorian wealth into civic infrastructure. He was the kind of figure who is hard to imagine now: a former screw-manufacturer who became a national politician, a Liberal who broke with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule, the father of Neville Chamberlain and the half-brother of Austen. His memorial fountain, designed by John Henry Chamberlain (no relation), was unveiled in his presence on 10 October 1880 as the centrepiece of the new public square. The 20-metre stone canopy still stands. Chamberlain himself lived another thirty-four years after the unveiling, long enough to watch the square fill up with statues of the city's other heroes.

Joseph Priestley's statue stands here, moved from Victoria Square - then called Council House Square - in some earlier reshuffling. Priestley discovered oxygen in 1774, only to have his Birmingham laboratory and library destroyed in the Priestley Riots of 1791, the same riots that took Baskerville's house a few blocks west. He fled to America. His bronze in Chamberlain Square is one of the city's quieter apologies. Nearby stands James Watt, the Scottish engineer whose improvements to the steam engine made the Industrial Revolution practical and who spent most of his working life in Birmingham as Matthew Boulton's partner at the Soho Manufactory. Watt's statue was originally on Paradise Street next to the Town Hall. The Chamberlain Memorial fountain, Priestley, Watt, and Attwood: four versions of what Birmingham wanted to remember about itself in the late nineteenth century, gathered into one square.

In November 2015 the square closed to the public. It would not reopen until March 2021. The reason was the Paradise scheme, a seven-hundred-million-pound redevelopment by Argent Group that took down the Brutalist Birmingham Central Library and the Paradise Forum beneath it, both of them landmarks of 1970s civic architecture that the public had grown to dislike. Grant Associates won the contract for the new public realm in 2014. New paving, new steps, new lighting, and two enormous commercial buildings - One Chamberlain Square and Two Chamberlain Square - now define the western edge, offering a combined 350,000 square feet of office space. The square reopened as the final piece of Phase One of Paradise, six years after the works began. Many Birmingham residents are still adjusting to a city centre without the Central Library.

The square hosts the Birmingham Christmas Craft Fair from the third Friday in November to 23 December each year. The event started in 1997 under the name Winterval - a portmanteau the council adopted to bundle a long stretch of seasonal programming together, and one that briefly became a culture-war flashpoint when tabloids accused Birmingham of secularising Christmas. The council had done no such thing. They had simply run a long marketing campaign. But the name stuck in the national imagination and Winterval became a recurring grievance in British newspapers for years afterwards. The fair itself - mulled wine, handmade gifts, a brass band tuning up near the Chamberlain Memorial - has carried on regardless. So has the BBC Big Screen, which once stood here until September 2007 broadcasting sports and ceremonies to whoever happened to be passing.

Stand at Attwood's bronze steps and turn slowly. On one side is the City of Birmingham Council House, whose side elevation forms the eastern wall of the square. On another is the entrance to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, partly housed within the same building. Across from that is Birmingham Town Hall, the 1834 neoclassical concert hall modelled on the Temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome. Behind you are the two new Chamberlain Square buildings of the Paradise development, all stone-coloured panels and tall windows, designed to sit politely next to the Victorian neighbours without pretending to be Victorian themselves. Chamberlain's bronze face looks out over all of it from the top of the memorial fountain. He saw the Victorian version. He did not see the Brutalist version. The version he is looking at now is the third one this square has tried.