We stopped for two nights at a dilapidated corner of the Gdańsk shipyard. What the area lacked in bucolic charm was richly compensated by its history. Lech Walęsa and his fellow shipyard workers formed Poland’s first independent trade union, Solidarity. In 1983 Walęsa received the Nobel Prize for Peace and, in 1990, he became President of the Republic of Poland.
At the time of the fall of communism in 1989, Polish GDP per capita was about 40% of the UK equivalent; in 2024 that figure was 80%.
The whole docklands area was being regenerated and a few hundred yards from our billet were up-market apartment buildings, cafés and restaurants. We wandered through an indoor street-food market and had ramen noodles and gyozas for supper.
We paid £24 a night (with electric hook-up) to stay at the shipyard and we wondered whether our parking spot would survive the developers’ bulldozers.
The next day we walked along the canal into the city where we had lunch in a waterfront fish restaurant that used to be part of the old fish market. It was a Sunday and the canal was busy with tripper boats and pleasure craft. There was a modern single span pedestrian drawbridge that opened to allow the taller ships through. The bridge opened several times an hour, the whole lifting operation took 2 minutes.
It was still dark when we woke the next morning at 6am. Already there were lights on in the buildings around us, lorries were making deliveries and we could hear the noises of industry coming from inside the old buildings.
We visited an art exhibition by local artists which was more than enough “culture” for one week!
