Things to do in Łódź

Landmark · The spine of the city

A four-kilometre dead-straight commercial street laid out on an old trade route, lined with the tenements the textile barons built.

Local tip: Walk it north to south with your eyes up: the facades are the whole nineteenth century in sequence. Then duck into the courtyards — most of the interesting bars, studios and restaurants are through an archway rather than on the street.

Nightlife · Piotrkowska 138/140

A former cotton mill turned into a courtyard of bars, studios, record shops and small restaurants without being renovated into blandness.

Local tip: It is the single best answer to 'is there anything going on in Łódź'. Go on a Friday evening in summer when the courtyard fills up, and note that half the businesses inside are one-person operations that have been there for a decade.

Culture · Poznański's factory complex, west of Piotrkowska

Izrael Poznański's red-brick empire — mill, palace and workers' housing — converted into a vast retail, museum and hotel complex around a public square.

Local tip: Skip the shops and go to the Poznański Palace next door, which is the family's actual house and shows exactly how much money the textile boom made. The MS2 modern art museum inside the complex holds one of Poland's best twentieth-century collections.

Neighborhood · South-east of the centre

Karol Scheibler's self-contained factory town — mill, workers' terraces, school, hospital, fire station and villa — built as a single system in the 1870s.

Local tip: This is the best-preserved industrial settlement in Poland and people still live in the terraces. Walk the length of the workers' housing, then look at the Herbst villa at the end of it, and the whole logic of nineteenth-century paternalist capitalism is laid out in one street.

Culture · Around Łódź Fabryczna station

The city's first power station, rebuilt as a science centre and planetarium beside the underground station that anchors an entirely new district.

Local tip: Łódź Fabryczna is one of the largest underground railway stations in Europe and it was built for a cross-city tunnel that is still being finished. The planetarium in EC1 is genuinely good; the surrounding building site is the city betting its future on a piece of infrastructure.

Culture · Bałuty, north

The largest Jewish cemetery in Europe — over forty hectares, around two hundred thousand graves, and the Poznański mausoleum.

Local tip: Much of it is deliberately left half-wooded, which makes the scale hit harder than a tidied site would. The Ghetto Field at the edge holds the graves of those who died in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Almost no visitor to Łódź comes here and it is the most important place in the city.