Lodz Audio Tours

Lodz arrived late, grew impossibly fast, and paid for it. In 1820 it was a village of under a thousand people. By 1913 it had 500,000, driven by cotton textile mills that earned it the nickname 'the Polish Manchester'. The factory owners built palaces along Piotrkowska Street, one of the longest commercial streets in Europe, while workers lived in brick tenements behind the same facades. That tension is still visible in the buildings today.

What nobody expected was what happened next.

After the war, while Warsaw was being rebuilt from rubble, the National Film School opened in Lodz in 1948 and quietly became one of the most important film schools in the world. Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda both trained here. The city is now a UNESCO City of Film, and the EC1 complex, built inside a converted power station, houses the National Centre for Film Culture. The industrial hulks that once housed looms now hold galleries, clubs, and studios.