Rail travel chaos hits Warsaw

We had been warned. Yesterday, the suburban line between W-wa Śródmieście and W-wa Wschodnia was shut while the new station at W-wa Stadion is completed. The line should re-open on 24 July. Until then - what? I have just acquired a new corporate client for English on ul. Kijowska, corner of ul. Targowa. Three times a week. The ideal way to get there is by train from Powiśle to Wschodnia. OK - no train. Alternatives? Tram? Sorry - the whole of Targowa is being dug up, no trams right now. Bus? 138 from the office... runs infrequently, will now be overcrowded. Bicycle seems to be the only way. But what a way - a round trip of 50km looks likely.

With the suburban line cut, one rail commuting option is to get to W-wa Centralna and take the double-decker Radom train. I tried this one last night. Centralna is changing quickly - in mid-remont - and still many inconveniences for travellers. I'm trying to get to Platform 4. I'm informed by the new, blue indicators that my train will depart at 19:07. But the main staircase is shut off. So I make my way along the re-opened passage along the northern side of the station to the stairs at the end of the platform. Below: the re-opened transversal passage at the east end of the station. The staircase is open, though the escalators are not working - and there's no signage.

No working signage at the platform either. Will the train (which the online timetable claims will depart at 19:00) arrive according to the displayed time, or the internet time? It leaves at 19:07. But then it waits at signals, makes a long stop at W-wa Al. Jerozolimskie, and finally arrives at W-wa Jeziorki 15 minutes later than the advertised time. Essentially - if you're going to be travelling from Centralna, give yourself plenty of time to get to the platform and take the online timetable with a pinch of salt.

What else is new at W-wa Centralna? Officially sanctioned graffiti. I mentioned what was going on earlier this week at W-wa Powiśle, the day before the station closed for eight weeks. Here at Centralna, a similar story. To spruce up the drab walls, selected graffiti artists have been given free rein on the basis that if not them, less-gifted individuals will cover the surface with something, well, less arty.

So then - what have we got here? "Przestrzeń jest tym co powstrzymuje wszystko od bycia w tym samym miejscu." "Space is that which stops everything being in the same place?" Good God Almighty! The spirit of the Master of Paddington is alive and well! He who painted "Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere", that enduring slogan painted on a wall outside Paddington station, beloved of the Daily Telegraph's Way of the World column.

Above: New platform, new carriages, old engine. The Radom-bound train enters Centralna's refurbished Platform 4. According to Gazeta Wyborcza, the jury is still out regarding the graffiti. 'It's a scandal!' the headline cries.

This time last year:
Hurting and healing

This time three years ago:
The land where I was born

This time four years ago:
Night moves

A new lick of paint for W-wa Powiśle

The nearest railway station to my office, W-wa Powiśle, is a pearl of post-socialist-realist socialist architecture. Very moderne, very stylish. And its one of my favourite Polish railway stations - architecturally at least (I'll pass on a complete lack of signage, timetables at the entrance on ul. Kruczkowskiego and a working clock). But its all-white plaster finish had left it painfully vulnerable to anyone with a spray can and a vandalistic streak. Today I was delighted to see a new coat of paint being applied at the Kruczkowskiego end of the station (below) - and what an interesting scheme it is too!

The new paint extends up to platform level - I hope they manage to do the sides as well. It makes such a difference, especially in the bright sunlight of late-May. (Read about W-wa Powiśle architecture in this post about Warsaw railway architecture by Owen Hatherley)

Sadly, the vandalistic end of graffiti world, suffering from spray-can incontinence, will no doubt waste no time in daubing their tired, boring tags on top of the bright new street art, much as they did at W-wa Żwirki i Wigury and W-wa Rakowiec after artists set about improving the stations (for some reason the flamingo and stork cartoons at W-wa Al. Jerozolimskie were left largely untouched).

This time last year:
The ingredients of success

What happened at the Graffiti Wall

Returning home on Thursday evening, I saw the entire length of the Graffiti Wall along ul. Puławska by the Służewiec racetrack had been cordonned off with crowd control barriers. Security personnel stood at either end and along the whole kilometer length of the wall. "Funny," I thought... "I can't recall any rock act of global renown playing at Wyścigi..."

Mentioning this to Moni, who's au fait with what's occurring, I learned that sportswear firm Adidas had paid the racetrack's owner, the state totalisator, to paint over the entire wall, covering graffiti and street art alike with one huge advert.

What happened next is an case study in how to get vast amounts of bad PR - and an object lesson in how to mitigate the disasterous effects of getting it so badly wrong. As soon as word got out what Adidas was intending to do, a Facebook page was set up, on which thousands of practitioners and fans of street art mounted a massive protest. By Saturday, Adidas had thrown in the towel. The damage to the company's reputation among its target group (young, urban, trendy) had been done. About half the wall's length had been painted over in black, ready for advertising that never came. Instead came the recriminations.

Above: Could the ad agency not have predicted this reaction (replete with spelling mistake and mispunctuation)? Further on down the wall, anarchists used the event to critique capitalism. Now, even if Adidas had gone ahead with the huge ad, it would have been defaced to the point of illegibility within one night. Entirely counterproductive, a complete lack of understanding of the street art subculture.

Above: Do you remember how? I trust the previous murals had all been photographed by their creators and are in some digital archive somewhere, accessible at a mouse's click... The upside of the Adidas fiasco is that at a stroke, it created half a kilometer of fresh surface to be covered. And immediately, some striking new images arise, such as the one below.

Below: Meanwhile far away in another part of town, some football hooligans' graffiti - well, no, street art. Graffiti would be a foul oath followed by the name of some football club that it's unfashionable to follow in some small village.

This time last year:

First long bike ride of the season

This time two years ago:

Life returns to Jeziorki

This time three years ago:

Swans fly in

Welcome to Warsaw

Returning home after a business mixer via Dworzec Centralny (Warsaw's central station), I notice that the refurbishment of the platforms is now underway, with Track 4, Platform 2 and Track 5, Platform 3 now closed off for building work. Across on Track 3, a night train to Moscow via Minsk is boarding. The entire station smells characteristically of coal smoke, as the Russian trains still use it for carriage heating.

Below: Some Russian graffiti on a column on Platform 3. I have no clue what it says; it may well be obscene, or existentialist, or love-lorn, or all three, and probably vodka-fuelled. Any reader care to have a stab at what the Master of Warsaw Central* has scrawled here?

I am reminded of a communist-era joke. A Parisian is heading by train to Moscow. A Muscovite is heading by train to Paris. By mistake both alight in Warsaw. The Muscovite looks around in delight: "Ah! Paris!" The Parisian looks around in disgust: "Urgh! Moscow!"

* A reference to The Master of Paddington, whose famous statement "Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere" was for many years daubed on a brick wall on the approaches to London Paddington station. Now long gone, immortalised by Peter Simple in his Way of the World column in the Daily Telegraph.

Good graffiti, bad graffiti

A stone's throw from my office is the Trasa Łazienkowska viaduct leading to the Łazienkowski bridge. Until last month, the pillars holding up the viaduct were a typical inner-city landscape of brutalist concrete spattered with primitive tags and statements about the parentage of Legia football club's chairman, directors and owners. In other words, not a place one would like to be.

Last week, a group of street artists has reclaimed this area and has painted dozens of excellent pieces of art on what were until now filthy, malodorous, urine- and obscenity-stained surfaces.

Above: Not sure whether this is meant to be the late Michael Jackson in his prime, but it is certainly a whole lot better than how this particular wall looked before. The mix of techniques suggests the amount of care and time taken to do this work. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, "what is painted without effort is looked at without pleasure".

Left: Stalin's gift to the people of Warsaw, immortalised. With a raccoon peering around it (rather than King Kong on the Empire State Building) and a rather fat cosmonaut in orbit overhead. Humour and localisation. Pure Warsaw. I like it. It's great having a free contemporary art gallery so close to my place of work.


I like this pop-art style (right); the artist known as Simpson has a fine line in 1930s and '40s Americana; this Disneyesque laughing horse, roller brush in hand. The technique used (Ben-Day dots) harks back to the comic books of the day and to artist Roy Lichtenstein.

Below: Street art takes on a political dimension - Lukashenka, Europe's last dictator and hilarious mustachio'd comb-over merchant, is sent into orbit by the people of Belarus.


A peacock (left), symbolic of the nearby Park Łazienkowski. Behind, on another pillar, more street art. This is such an improvement over what was here before - guys, keep it up!

Prior to this sudden outburst of quality street art under Trasa Łazienkowska, Warsaw's main claim to fame in this area is the eastern wall of the horse-racing track at Służewiec, running alongside ul. Puławska. I'm surprised I've not blogged this one before.

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this has become legendary as Europe's longest unbroken stretch of street art.

It's been here for as long as I recall - I first remember seeing this back in 1995, and by then it was already established as a local landmark. However, 70% of the content is boring big tags - a few distorted letters, a bit of shading - nothing new or original, but colourful and infinitely preferable to grey concrete. The city gets its public art for free.

Above: This wall goes on for one non-stop kilometre. Here and there, you will find interesting pieces. But they are rare, and typically, works don't stay on for long, they get painted over (so the wall is fresh and lives a dynamic existence). Although the elderly fabric is crumbling.

Right: my current favourite on the Słuzewiec graffiti wall. A reference to American WW2 feminist icon Rosie the Riveter? Work signed Simpson.

As a society, we need to distinguish between primitive graffiti and decent street art. A mindless tag on someone's property, the visual equivalent of a dog peeing up against a wall, deserves punishment: 100 lashes, or being made to inhale the content of your spray can, or being chained to the nearest railing for 48 hours with a sign around your neck saying 'VANDAL'. Yet street art, which elevates passers-by, causing them to pause and reflect, and which brightens otherwise brutalistic grey expanses of concrete, is a social GOOD.

My tips to those wishing to go out and do some:

* Know what you want to do before you start
* Seek to enliven drab expanses of grey concrete but-
* Don't paint on brick or stone
* Don't paint on private property
* Leave public transport - trains and stations - be
* Graffiti in pedestrian underpasses frightens people
* I really don't care who your favourite football team is
* If you can't do anything more advanced than a tag, don't bother.

The street art pictured below fails to make the grade. It's in the wrong place - the beautiful Most Poniatowski bridge, vandalised by graffiti; it's derivative – a second-rate Banksy rip-off, and it's in poor taste.