Head up to road level from Bournville station, and this is what you find. A 1920s substation, from the days when "The Corporation" handled electricity.
What a beauty it is too. OK, the various extensions don't add anything to the look, but at least the building is still doing the same job it was built for - even being upgraded a few years ago.
Younger readers may not understand just how widely the tentacles of the local authority once spread. Nowadays, everything is chopped up, and sold off, but once, the council was seen as a benevolent body that looked after the local area. People actually cared who their local representatives were. When this place was built, people were proud of their construction, and intended it to last a very long while. I wonder if they expected it to be doing the job a century later, though.
From a modelling perspective, putting the name of your fictional council on the end of a building like this would help the viewer form an idea of where the layout is set. This isn't a complicated building either, as the view on Streetview shows.
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