Late-November pictorial round-up

Some pics that didn't make previous posts, but which merit a viewing anyway. Below: Plac Hallera, Praga Północ. An overlooked piece of socialist realist architecture, dating back to 1957, by which time the style (and the ideological direction which spawned it) were passe. Until 1990, this square was named after some communist whom Stalin had murdered in 1938, but who was rehabilitated under Khrushchev.

Below: round the back of W-wa Zachodnia (Warsaw West) railway station, rows of social wagons housing workers on the big infrastructure project that will be renovating W-wa Główna station, further east. The skyline of Warsaw is rising ever higher...

Below: approaching W-wa Główna - this was the former terminus for commuter trains coming in from the west. It is being rebuilt to serve the same purpose during the planned reconstruction of the transversal lines crossing underneath Central Warsaw. Behind it rise the new buildings around Rondo Daszyńskiego.

Below: 'piwo z ranka, jak śmietanka' - a morning beer is like cream. This is one of the bars in the underground passage linking bus and train stations at Zachodnia. For some reason, one is not prohibited from smoking here, so a unique and nostalgic atmosphere for anyone liking that smell - beer and cigarettes.

Touch and go for my trip to Kraków the other week - I could see my connecting train from W-wa Jeziorki to W-wa Zachodnia was delayed by well over 20 minutes. So plan B - take bus to Metro, Metro to Centrum, walk (or rather run) from there to W-wa Centralna. Below: my train , standin' over there, on Track 2, Platform 3, about to depart at 08:45. It's 08:40, so I made it.

Below: Czachówek - where the Warsaw-Radom line crosses the Skierniewice-Łuków line.

Below: further down along the Warsaw-Radom line, Sułkowice station. Now the new 'up' line has been completed, the old 'down' line is being ripped up.

A beautiful day on the działka.

Below: heading back to town from Jakubowizna, I pass this house, "shining hard and bright/'cross this dark highway".

This time last year:
Artificial Intelligence vs Artificial Consciousness

This time two years ago:
Viaduct takes shape in the snow

This time five years ago:
No in-work benefits for four years?

This time six years ago:

Third snow-free November in a row

This time seven years ago:

Another November without snow

This time eight years ago:
Snow-free November

This time nine years ago:
Krakowskie Przedmieście in the snow

This time tenyears ago:
Ul. Poloneza closed for the building of the S2

Nightmare echoes of the Holodomor

Agnieszka Holland's film Mr Jones (Polish title Obywatel Jones) is not perfect but it does stand out as an important film for our time. It tells the story of British journalist Gareth Jones, one of the first Westerners to report the scale of the famine set in train by Stalin in 1932-33 in Ukraine.

It is a film that resonates today as journalists and politicians conveniently side-step the truth for the sake of expedience - blinded to it by greed, ideology, laziness or just unwillingness to rock the boat. Parallels to today's politics - though far less murderous - are not lost on the audience.

Trying to tell a story as wide-sweeping and horrific as the Holodomor in a movie two hours and 21 minutes long is a demanding task. It depends on being able to break it down into bite-sized scenes that strung together over the film's length show a continuous narrative unfolding.

One criticism is that the actors portraying the starving Ukrainian peasants did not look starving enough; the emaciation that one sees in the few photos to have made it out of that hell is not evident in the film. But overall, the film's klimat or atmosphere is chillingly nightmarish. The brutal realities of Stalin's USSR, overseen by an army of thugs, informers and murderers, a landscape bereft of sunlight, Moscow a city of architectural monumentalism, dwarfing Soviet citizens. The technology of the time, put to use to invigilate and coerce a nation, is nicely shown too.

Mr Jones draws on history but uses some narrative ploys that undermine authenticity. The film suggests that David Lloyd George was the British prime minister in 1933. "By the 1930s Lloyd George was on the margins of British politics" (Wikipedia). The prime minister at the time was Ramsay McDonald. Throughout the film we see George Orwell writing Animal Farm, an allegory on Soviet communism; a book that was written ten years later (1943-44) and not published until 1945, ten years after Jones's death. It is unlikely that Orwell ever met Jones.

However, Walter Duranty, the British-American journalist, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times is portrayed with greater historical accuracy, being the villain of the piece. Duranty preferred to lie on Stalin's behalf to the Western world, denying the man-made famine in Ukraine. It was an event on a scale of inhumanity and barbarism on a par with the Holocaust.

Music - Antoni Łazarkiewicz - that recurring 12-note piano motif sounds very much like the motif in Carter Burwell's soundtrack for the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man (2009). But the Western jazz of the day, in its full decadence, clashes with haunting Ukrainian folk songs about the hunger and its effect on the people.

The film is truly international in scale, set in London, Moscow, Ukraine and Wales; the dialogue in four languages. Man's inhumanity to man and the contrast between the powerful and the poor is present in both the United Kingdom and in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - but the latter is in an utterly different world of brutal inhumanity. Agnieszka Holland makes the point that during the Great Depression, many Western idealists, seeing the human suffering around them, looked to Stalin and the USSR as the future - how wrong they were.

Having watched the film in Kinoteka (within the Stalinist Palace of Culture), I stepped out into the colossal marbled hall outside the screening room, amid its massive columns and high ceilings and felt as if I were back in the movie; the purpose of Socialist-Realist architecture was to oppress through scale.

Three nights in a row I had nightmares which touched on this film. I commend it thoroughly, despite some shortcomings.

This time last year:
The Earth is flat

This time two years ago:
50th Anniversary of the Fiat 125p

This time three years ago:
Fidel Castro's death divides the world

This time four years ago:
London to Edinburgh by night bus

This time six year ago:
The Regent's Canal, London

This time eight years ago:
An end to the entitlement way of thinking

This time nine year:
West Ealing - drab and sad end of town

This time ten years ago:
To Poznań by train

This time 12 years ago:
Late autumn drive-time 

To Tychy

To most Poles, Tychy (20km/12 miles south of Katowice) is best known for brewing Tyskie beer and for the production of the new Fiat 500. A large and important part of the Silesian agglomeration (130,000 population - the size of Norwich), Tychy is somewhat subsumed in the larger whole - Poland's largest conurbation of 2.7 million people. The city is also of note for its Stalinist workers' district, built in the Socialist Realist style in 1951-56. Only Nowa Huta, the steel-mill suburb of Kraków, can boast a more expansive area of Socialist Realist housing. Below: stretched out over 18 hectares, located east of Tychy station, this is an architectural gem - Osiedle A ('estate A') of Nowe Tychy. Home to 6,100 people, it was intended as a model workers' community. No pub.

Look at this! An iconic image of the Stalinist era. Should it be painted over, or left for posterity? Where have I seen this before - on Pl. Konstytucji in Warsaw? Or on the cover of the 1949 Worker's Diary?

Below: Socialist Realism was neo-classical in form; street layouts inspired by Ancient Rome

Unofficial street art. Would Stalin and his henchmen have sought to track down and punish the author(s) of this criticism of the aesthetic conditions of this workers' paradise? What agent of Imperialist England (note the spelling: not 'color' as a CIA saboteur would have written) stands behind this attempt to subvert the Polish People's Republic? This photo is unaltered in Photoshop.

Left: literal translation - 'Prohibition of Game with Ball'.

Below: Tychy New Town (Nowe Miasto) is close to Tychy's main railway station. Two passenger trains from the Silesian regional railway operator SKR pass one another, while a PKP Cargo Siemens Vectron engine runs light between the platforms.

Below: what's this? A fire station? A film set? Security towers at a sensitive border crossing?

Left. No. This is a Catholic church. The parish church of St Francis of Assisi and St Clare. It looks like a defensive bastion - a fortified emplacement, a science-fiction structure - if the former, who is it protecting the parishioners against? And if the latter - I'd bet that it is successful in attracting those with an interest in fantasy fiction. One way or another, it's a church reflecting these times. (See it on Google Maps Street View 3D - impressive!)


Below: Tychy is one of three Polish cities that currently still have a trolleybus network - the others being Lublin and Gdynia. While the trolleybuses constitute the minority of the Tychy bus fleet, the bulk of the non-electrified buses are powered by compressed natural gas.

For a heavily industrialised town, having electric powered buses cuts back a bit on air pollution. The bulk of the non-trolleybus fleet is powered by compressed natural gas. Which also helps.

Below: but what's this? Back at the Tychy station, watching the imminent arrival of the InterCity train from Białystok to Bielsko-Biała... just look at the smoke pouring out of the signal box! You'd think that PKP could easily heat such buildings from the electricity in its overhead power lines - but no - filthy coal is being burnt.

This time three years ago:
Face to face with the UK retailing scene

This time four years ago:
Bricktorian Birmingham

This time six years ago:
Welcome to Lemmingrad

This time eight years ago:
Dream highway

This time ten years ago:
The Days are Marching

This time 11 years ago:
First snow, 2007

Symphony in Socialist-Realism

A grey lunchtime along the lower reaches of ul. Marszałkowska - Warsaw's main north-south thoroughfare - puts me in mind of Western stereotypes of Poland and the rest of the former Soviet bloc - this is how millions of not-too-well informed folk in the UK and North America think of whenever Poland is mentioned.

So rather than show hipster bars selling artisan beer, newly-opened shopping malls, beautiful urban parks, up-to-the-minute public amenities or new motorways - let's wallow in preconceptions. Let us go back to a Workers' (rather than Consumers') Paradise and see Poland's capital as it would have looked at the height of the Cold War. Let us take a short stroll down Marszałkowska, from Pl. Unii Lubelskiej to Al. Armii Ludowej.

Ul. Marszałkowska, corner of  Litewska

Wire netting, where Socialist Realism joins pre-war tenements

Ul. Marszałkowska, corner of Al. Armii Ludowej

Ul. Marszałkowska, corner of Zoli

Ul. Marszałkowska, the lower end.

Warsaw or Łódź? 150m north of Plac Unii shopping mall.

Update: Saturday 26 October - Today's Gazeta Stołeczna has picked up on the state of the southern end of Marszałkowska. In its front-page story about the growing number of empty premises in the city centre, it mentions this stretch of road, saying that there are 11 boarded-up properties between Pl. Unii and Pl. Zbawiciela. Easy to see why - the centre of retail gravity has moved northward (and now southward too). Despite the economic upturn, many shops and restaurants have closed down and the City authorities can't find new tenants for the premises. Less footfall, fewer shoppers.

This time last year:
Glasgow snapshots

This time two years ago:
A slow farewell to our Powiśle office

This time three years ago:
A slow farewell to my Nissan Micra

Gdynia Główna station after its remont

Although I had to be in Gdańsk this morning, I did not relish arriving there at 5am on the night train from Warsaw. My ticket was for Gdańsk, but I paid a small consideration to travel onto Gdynia, from where I'd return to Gdańsk in good time for the event I was moderating. This gave me 45 minutes extra sleep on the train, which was welcome.

At Gdynia, I found the station I'd last visited the previous summer fully reopened after its comprehensive remont. The post-war architecture has been sensitively restored to something approximating its original state, though with contemporary white-on-blue signage and raised floor guide-markings for the visually impaired.

Arrival at Gdynia Główna, just before six am. My night train is on the left.

One of the five restored mosaics; this one depicts the coastal economy.

Waiting room and ticket hall

Mosaic with the winged wheel symbol of PKP, Pegasus, and the Zodiac.

The station frontage: façade as seen from Gdynia's Pl. Konstytucji.

Mosaics from 1957 had been uncovered and the socialist-realist lamp fittings are working. And the crisp, cloudless morn, shortly before sunrise, offered the ideal conditions in which to admire the restored station.

Neo-classicism, Stalinist style

Is this ancient Rome? Are we in Athens? No, this is Warsaw's ul. Wspólna, home to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Socialist realist architecture of the highest order; a purely decorative colonnade (no, not a fizzy drink made from animals' colons) that acts as the building's façade.


Built between 1951 and 1955, the glory years of High-Stalinist SocReal, the building, two streets south of my office is quite something, yet is off not widely known because Wspólna is a rather narrow street, so there's no vantage point for a decent vista, and photographs of the frontage can only be partial.

Still, for the growing number of enthusiasts of this style of architecture (associated in the minds of those who lived through those terrible times with the brutal stupidity of the regime), this is certainly a building worth seeing.

Above: detail of colonnade - socialism - bringing classicism to the masses. Incidentally, the lack of straightness of horizontal lines - my new 35mm f1.8 Nikkor distorts like Pravda. But more on that in another post! Below: view of the west wing of the building, shot from ul. Grabowskiego. It's a shame there isn't a better place to photograph it from.

Those with Google Earth installed on their (fast) computer, do take a look at this building, though first switching on '3D buildings' feature.

Above: supplementary entry, late June 2012. Now I have a 10-24mm zoom Nikkor I can do things like this!

This time last year:
A week into Lent
[Easter was very late]

This time two years ago:
Afternoon-dusk-night in the city centre

This time three years ago:
Spey St. Veyder's

This time four years ago:
Wetlands waiting for the spring