New Street Station and Birmingham Airport – The Real Locations Behind Deadly Terror
New Street Station and Birmingham Airport, two of the busiest places in Birmingham, are the settings for Deadly Terror, book 4 in my Detective Zoe Finch series. I have a long, complicated history with both of them. Let me take you there.
Why New Street Station?
If you want to understand Birmingham, stand in the middle of New Street Station at rush hour.
I've passed through that station more times than I could ever count. When I was at secondary school, my daily commute took me through New Street, every single morning and every single afternoon. And it never really stopped. Ever since, I've gone in and out of it constantly – up to London, off around the country, into town to shop, to meet friends, to get to my writers' group. New Street is woven into the texture of my whole life.
It's also, when you think about it the way a crime writer can't help thinking about it, terrifyingly central. If you wanted to bring Birmingham to its knees – to terrorise the whole city in a single stroke – New Street is where you'd do it. Everything funnels through there. Hundreds of thousands of people. The beating heart of the city's movement.
I'll let you in on something. This isn't the first time I've put New Street in danger on the page. Years ago, in the third book of my Division Bell trilogy, Divided We Stand, I wrote a scene with a terror threat at New Street Station – and then, in that book, nothing actually happened. The threat passed.
In Deadly Terror, something does happen. A bomb goes off at New Street. And the chaos that follows ripples out across the entire city.
Birmingham Airport (which I can't stand)
The book's other great location is Birmingham Airport, and here I have to be honest with you. I don't like it.
It's an airport that's been far too small for its traffic for years. There always seems to be building work going on somewhere. It's just no fun to travel through. Though, to be fair, are any airports fun to travel through? I've come to think flying is designed to make us miserable as a kind of penance for the privilege of going on holiday. The flying itself I actually enjoy. It's the airport – the queues, the shuffling, the strip-lit limbo of it – that grinds me down every time.
So naturally I set a major incident there.
In Deadly Terror, an aeroplane catches fire on the runway, and Zoe finds herself swept up into the command response. A big, open space like an airport is a gift to a writer: long sight lines, things you can watch unfold from a distance – and, at night, plenty of darkness for things you can't see at all. It's a place where chaos can hide a great deal.
Why set a crime novel in a transport hub?
There's a particular irony in how differently I feel about my two locations in this book. New Street I have real affection for, even after all those years of commuting – it's the gateway to my whole city, the place every journey of my life seems to have passed through. The airport I'd happily never set foot in again.
And yet both of them are doing the same job in Deadly Terror. They're vast, busy, complicated spaces where thousands of strangers move through at once, where a single act of violence can spread panic in seconds, and where, crucially, an awful lot can go unnoticed in the chaos. For a crime writer, that's irresistible. Familiarity and dread, side by side.
That's the thing about Deadly Terror. The locations are real, vast and familiar. New Street, where I spent my school years. The airport, where I've spent too many miserable hours.
Real locations in Deadly Terror
Birmingham New Street Station
Birmingham Airport
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New to the series? Start with Deadly Wishes, or get the prequel novella Deadly Origins free.
