What colour pops into your mind when you hear the word Warsaw? If the colour is grey, read on.
Grey was what I expected when I first visited the Polish capital in 2001. It may have been lingering Cold War propaganda, but I wasn’t disappointed at what I found: grey communist facades lining vast grey streets where scowling locals walked on grey, cracked concrete pavements or – bowing to the car – through gloomy grey underpasses. That was then.
A few weeks ago, standing in the rooftop garden of Warsaw university’s library, everything looked very different. Maybe it was just the angular winter sun, but from my elevated rooftop perspective, the skyscrapers I had watched going up over the years had now merged into an impressive skyline to rival London or Frankfurt.
Like someone who has been going quietly to the gym, Warsaw has reinvented how it looks, feels and acts. Its capital’s new confident gleam mirrors Poland’s growing political, economic and diplomatic heft in Europe – all of which will be visible in the first half of 2025 when Poland holds the rotating European Union presidency.
As impressive as Warsaw looks today, it’s even more miraculous when you consider the century it has had. Warsaw of 1924 was a beautiful, cultured and thriving city in the heart of Europe, for some the Paris of the east.
Just 15 years later the Germans invited themselves and left, six cataclysmic years later. What was still standing after the Warsaw Uprising the Nazi troops blew up, block by block, as they retreated. Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist retells that shameful episode of German history.
After the Nazis retreated, the Red Army moved in and, from the 1950s on, planted Soviet-era blocks across the city with little concern for pre-war street grids.
The pinnacle of this colonialist planning is Warsaw’s palace of culture and science, a cross between New York’s Dakota building and Moscow’s “Seven Sisters” towers. This unwanted gift from Stalin opened its doors in 1955 still stands on a windy concrete expanse in the city centre.
By the time of Poland’s 1989 transition to democracy, much of Warsaw was a crumbling ruin. It’s difficult to believe today’s Warsaw is the same city.
Bit by bit the high-rise skyline, rising one skyscraper at a time, has hidden the palace of culture while interesting new low-rise buildings fill the empty expanse at its base.
The latest addition here is a museum of modern art, a striking white concrete building by New York-based architects Thomas Phifer and Partners. Its lobby and striking staircase are already a hit with visitors and on Instagram, but even that is nothing compared with the Warsaw renaissance happening underground.
In the years that Dublin has spent talking about a metro line – drawing coloured lines on maps and holding public hearings – Warsaw has built two lines. The first north-south line opened in 1995 and was extended until 2008. A year later, the contract was signed for a second east-west line and construction began in 2010. The initial segment opened after five years and further stations were added in 2019, including a challenging stretch under the Vistula river.
Bright, clean and reliable, the completed line of 21 stations is on course for completion in 2026. Last year, plans were agreed for three additional metro lines by 2050. Judging by Warsaw’s track record, these are ambitious goal that will be reached.
“Night and day” is how Dundalk native Seamus Pentony compares today’s Warsaw with the city he moved to 23 years ago.
Key to Warsaw’s transformation, he thinks, is a readiness to think in terms of generations, not in electoral terms. Another help, Pentony says, is the minimisation of “not in my backyard” special pleading against major public projects.
“Nimbyism is not tolerated, that’s why stuff gets built and done and why Warsaw feels like a big city,” he said. “Visiting Irish friends’ jaws hang for two days at what they see here.”
Another key advantage is an independent city government with a real budget, headed by a mayor with real power.
In the modern rebirth of Warsaw, many see Polish MEP Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz as the political midwife. In her 12 years as mayor of Warsaw mayor until 2018 she realised key transformational projects: the second new metro line, a €55 three-month public transport ticket, the remarkable regeneration of the Vistula riverfront. In all planning decisions, she says, her focus remained on Warsaw residents, in particular older people and young families.
“The most important projects for me have always been those that make it easier for residents of Warsaw to function in their daily lives,” she told The Irish Times. “Financial independence is needed, too, because it is the citizens of Warsaw who should decide what is most important to them.”
And what is important for them? Pushing back the car, for one, to create a pedestrian-friendly city.
Asphalt intersections have been converted into public squares that actually look – and function – like the architectural renderings. An elegant new bridge that opened last March across the Vistula river – 450m across and up to 16m wide – is closed to cars entirely.
As well as rebirth, Warsaw has shown remarkable powers of reinvention with its communist landmarks, too.
Rather than demolish its brutalist, functional central station from 1975, the massive hall has instead been given a makeover with futurist raised walkways and new lighting.
From there it is a short walk back to the university library’s roof garden: a green oasis open to all with no fear of expensive compensation claims.
Like most of Mitteleuropa, Warsaw still has many grey days in winter. The housing crisis here is as bad as elsewhere but, while Warsaw is busy and confident making plans for the century ahead, can Dublin say the same?
Long before I left the city in 2000, O’Connell Street was a mess. The Carlton cinema was shuttered and the adjacent site derelict. The trudge from Parnell Square to Grafton Street was the quickest way to get through the city. Entire streets – Westmoreland, D’Olier – were just places to endure, not places to linger. All of these problems remain. The last 100 years have been far less kind to Warsaw than Dublin yet the Polish capital and its citizens have flipped a burden of war and occupation into energy and agency. This is their city.
“Varsovians wanted very much to rebuild their capital city … determination is important here and has remained important to this day,” said Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz. “The energy, motivation and initiative of the Polish people is a historical and cultural legacy.”
Like its capital, Poland is on the move, too, overtaking Spain, Portugal and Greece in key European Union wealth and economic indices. A recent World Bank study suggested Polish per capita GDP could, within a decade, overtake that of the UK.
For Irishman Seamus Pentony, his new hometown feels like it has overtaken Dublin long ago.
“In Warsaw, things are happening in leaps and bounds,” he said. “The shackles are off and they’ve decided: ‘We are going for this.’”
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Our In The News podcast is now published daily – Find the latest episode here
