Lodz; Sunday, 24 July, 2016

I had a filling breakfast and then headed down to the tram stop to catch the tram up to just past where I’d walked to the previous evening- it was a nice stroll, but not something you’d want to keep repeating when cheap public transport is available.

My destination for the morning was Manufaktura – a large retail and leisure park at the North end of town. This may appear an odd place to head, but it is one of the highlights of the city and its new beating heart.

Lodz was a village of some 500 people at the start of the 19th Century. By the outbreak of the Second World War the population was the other side of 600,000 and it was all down to the linen mills that built up around the city. The largest, and most elegant one, was built by Izrael Posnanski and included multiple mill buildings, laboratories, workers housing and his own palatial palace. From the grand days of the late 19th Century the 20th was less kind and eventually the company that had taken on the mills after the collapse of communism itself collapsed and the site fell into ruin. At the turn of the 21st Century the site was regenerated into a leisure and shopping district housing museums, cafes, bars, cinemas and other attractions. The centre of the site was turned into the largest Rynek in Poland.

Rynek’s are the ancient medieval market squares at the heart of the old towns of all of Poland’s major cities (or at least those that existed as cities in the medieval period), so prior to the opening of Manufactura Lodz hadn’t had one.

My first stop of the morning was to the museum of the factory – located in one of the former office buildings – that houses an exhibition on the history of the site from its founding to its regeneration. I also took advantage of the add-on ticket to climb up onto the roof for views across the site with a good information board giving key details about the buildings and what they were used for.

Across the site and in one of the later buildings to be added – a three storey mill – is the ms2 museum, part of the city’s art gallery and dedicated to their collection of 20th and 21st century modern and contemporary art. I had a bit of a wander around that before stopping off for lunch in one of the restaurants on the site.

From Manufaktura I walked the short distance back to Plac Wolnosci where I joined a tour of one of the more interesting sites in the city – the sewer that runs underneath the giant roundabout. The sewer itself isn’t actually a functioning sewer, it was used in the early days as a place to store large volumes of water that could then be flushed down into the sewers of the streets leading off of the square – including the main North-South road through the city. The interesting tour did a full loop of the gloriously cool sewer before returning to the surface.

Part of the reason for going on the tour was to get out of the oppressive heat of the day which I returned to after the tour. I walked down the main street from Plac Wolnosci until I found a pleasant look (and very cheap) bar and stopped there under the shade and with a cold beer relaxing for some time.

After the beer I headed back to the hotel for a little while to get out of the heat, before heading back up to Manufaktura for dinner in a very nice restaurant I’d spotted earlier in the day.

I overdosed on Pierogi’s (Polish dumplings) and so ended up leaving the hotel feeling very full, consequently I didn’t feel like running for the tram and ended up having to wait 10 minutes for the next one back down to my hotel and bed.