What's new on the Warsaw-Mysiadło border

On the borders of Warsaw and Mysiadło, things are stirring. Below: a new junction is being built on the corner of ul. Kuropatwy and Puławska. This will result in another set of traffic lights along the notoriously-choked main road into town from the south. To the left of the photo below - construction is under way of a Selgros cash-and-carry. It will be a big one. It opens in October. If you run your own business, you'll be offered a card without which you won't be able to benefit from the wholesale discounts at this store.

Going right back along ul. Kuropatwy (named after Japanese film maker, Akito Kuropatwa) to a new roundabout, it's clear that this investment is intended to make for easier access to the new Selgros (to the left). Note the electricity pylons, still in use, standing in the middle of the road. These will have to replaced before the road can be completed. Kuropatwy marks the border between Warsaw (to the right) and Mysiadło (to the left).

Below: looking south from the same roundabout, this time with wide-angle lens again. This is the terrain of the old PGR Mysiadło collective farm, which became Eko Mysiadło and went bankrupt in 2000. Legal disputes into the land's ownership drag on. But bit by bit, the plot is being sold off and put to use. The new Selgros will be to the right of this view, occupying a goodly chunk of the old PGR lands.

Below: moving further south towards Piaseczno, the track turned to a morass by rainfall and construction plant. This road will eventually be asphalted/paved; it emerges on ul. Geodetów.

Below: the abandoned admin block of PGR Mysiadło. A magnet for the urban explorer... Venture in at your own risk...

Below: the interior suggests that this is a local teenage drinking den; empty spray tins and beer cans everywhere. The place has been ransacked for anything of value years ago.

Below: a sign on this abandoned building is for drivers of construction vehicles, pointing the way to the Selgros site.

Below: the road continues south towards ul. Geodetów. While Puławska was being modernised ten years ago, traffic was being diverted down this route...

Below: how it looked back then.

While seeing what's new on the Warsaw's southern border - what's this I see from ul. Katarynki? A nuclear reactor? A mosque? No, it's the first new Orthodox church (cerkiew) to be built in Warsaw for over 100 years.

Below: view of what will be Warsaw's Hagia Sophia; trees in the background are over the border in Mysiadło. In bare concrete, it does have the air of an observatory or chemicals plant...

View of the front of the building from Puławska. Construction began in autumn 2015. When completed, it will be painted white with a silvery-blue dome.

To the side of the building is a temporary wooden church, at which worshippers pray while the construction is in progress.

This time last year:
Four stations from Jeziorki to Czachówek

This time three years ago:
High over Eastern Ukraine

This time four years ago:
From shouted slogans to practical policy

This time five years ago:
Who should pay for railways?

This time seven years ago:
Grunwald - the big picture

This time nine years ago:
"Take me right back to the track, Jack"

This time ten years ago:
The summer sublime

It's just an Ilyushin

"Planning permission has been denied..." Yes, but never mind the bureaucracy - is this a good idea? The fuselage of this Ilyushin Il-14 passenger plane suddenly turned up on the corner of ul. Marszałkowska and Świętokrzyska, just across the street from my office, just after I'd read about it on Twitter. Apparently, it's going to be a themed diner. And I must say, I like the concept. It will play well with the tourists seeking the communist-era vibe. Across the way to the left is the Palace of Culture, from where fleets of Nyskas, Fiat 125Ps, Maluchs  and Ogóreks take foreign visitors on themed 'adventures' around the city. Son Eddie disagrees. He says that for him Warsaw has not a shred of communism left in it - it's now the dziki kapitalizm atmosphere of the early 1990s.

But at city hall, the powers-that-be are not happy. "Mr Restaurateur - your papers are not in order." Or simply not even filed. This large aluminium tube just popped up overnight.

Will it remain? And in time, become another well-loved, must-visit icon of central Warsaw? As I passed it today after work, a guy was busy spray-painting it (note newspapers masking-taped to windscreen). Or will the authorities terminate it with extreme prejudice? If they do so, the view from my window will be just that little bit less interesting...

The Ilyushin Il-14 was a twin-piston commercial and military transport that first flew in the mid-1950s, intended as a replacement for the licence-produced copy of the Douglas DC-3, the Lisunov Li-2. In Poland, the Il-14 remained in service into the 1980s.

If your memories of early 1980s British popular music are waning (or non-existent), let me refresh them. Have a listen to Imagination - Just an Illusion...



Bonus shot, 14 July: an Antonov An-26B (EW-328TG) of Belarusian cargo airline Genex coming into land this evening. A regular visitor to Okęcie, usually before 8pm, photographable at this time of year.

This time two years ago:
Marathon stroll (31.5km) along the Vistula

This time three years ago:
Complaining about the lack of a river crossing between Siekierki and Góra Kalwaria!

This time four years ago:
S2 update (nearly ready, as it happened)

This time five years ago:
Progress on S2 bypass - photos from the air

This time seven years ago:
Up Śnieżnica

This time ten years ago:
July continues glum (2007 - a rainy summer)

S7 extension - last summer of quiet

Following up on last week's post about the S7 extension from the airport to Grójec, I'll zoom in to consider the local effects on the road. This summer will probably be the last in which the land between the railway line and Dawidy Bankowe lies quiet. Walking there today, not a soul in sight, the sound of skylarks above me, I sensed the end of an era approaching. Next summer, if all goes well, bulldozers will have carved a wide scar through the land, and slowly Warsaw will get its expressway south. I enumerated the benefits last week - losing the tranquil fields across the tracks is the price we pay.

Below: I superimposed the Siskom map onto a Google Maps satellite image. It looks like ul. Kórnicka will once again cross the tracks (though viaduct or level crossing - this is not marked). Just round the back of the Action distribution centre in Zamienie will be a junction, though again, its exact layout is not clear. There will be a network of service roads, and a viaduct carrying ul. Sporna (currently a farm track bisected by the railway line). Will local traffic be able to use the service roads (marked in green)? Judging by the S7 south of Grójec, yes. This will be very convenient.

Below: I've superimposed the above route of the road onto a photo of the fields, with the LogMaster distribution centre on ul. Baletowa top right. The two white lines show the approximate edges of the expressway; the service roads will run to the left and right of them.

Scrutiny of the map suggests that few houses will be bulldozed to make way for the road, mainly on ul. Baletowa and in the village of Nowa Wola. Others will not be touched but will be directly affected. Below: photo taken from ul. Postępu in Zgorzała looking across at houses on ul. Wróbelka. The expressway will cut right through here. There will no doubt be acoustic screens, but even so, quality of life of people living on either side of the S7 will suffer. Officially, the houses are also in Zgorzała, but once the road's built, they will be cut off from the village; it would make sense to append this street to Zamienie.

Progress has a price, the local wildlife will no doubt move somewhere quieter. Talking of which, I caught this pheasant promenading on the wall of the neighbouring farm. Photo taken from my bedroom. You won't see this living in the centre of Warsaw, yet Jeziorki is now just 28 minutes away from the centre by train.

This time last year:
Getting out of Mordor

This time seven years ago:
Ćwilin, conquered

This time eight years ago:
Sunset across the tracks, Nowa Iwiczna

This time nine years ago:
The storm the forecasters missed

This time ten years ago:
Peacocks in the Park

Trump flies in

Two planes, one carrying Trump.  We followed them in on ADS-B Exchange, filters set to military flights only. One flew in some half an hour before the second. This is VC-25A 82-8000.

The flightpath of the first one approaching Okęcie... Note the zigzag route - this looks like some form of electronic countermeasure. I've never seen this behaviour before on ADS-B Exchange's radar before. Usually courses are shown as straight lines, or if the flight is sensitive, the pilot simply switches off the transponder. Callsign for this plane was SAM45.

And here's the second VC-25A, 92-9000 (officially Air Force One) over our house... 'Aircraft is not transmitting its callsign'.

And the flightpath as it passes over Puławska and Pyry (then the pilot switched off the transponder).

I'll be out of town during Trump's visit.

This time three years ago:
Making Poland's railways safer

Marks & Sparks is closing down, closing down...

An icon of British clothing retail is quitting Poland. Well, we knew this last autumn, and we've been expecting the store to close with the end of last year. It's soldiering on until the end of this month. Just across the road and a bit from my office, the departure of Marks & Spencers will not go unrecorded here.

But is it a shame? Don't know...

Marks & Spencers could have been massive in Poland today. They could have been what Zara or H&M are. But no. Instead, we have a business-school case-study of how not to do market entry. And the advantage the brand had when the old system gave way to free-market democracy! Marks & Spencers was well known in Poland for decades.

Back in communist days, many Poles had families in the West who'd send them, as my family did, parcels of clothes. Not to wear, but to sell. Polish consumers, starved of anything fashionable, colourful or distinguishing, would go to bazaars (like Skra or Bazar Różyckiego in Warsaw) where people with connections in the West would sell them for hard currency. My parents would regularly send parcels to their families in Poland; parcels would contain clothes from Marks & Spencer (the well-regarded St Michael's brand in those days), carefully wrapped. Well do I remember driving with my parents and my brother after Polish Saturday school in Chiswick to a small Paczki do Polski shop on the Fulham Palace Road from where fashionable knitwear wrapped in brown paper would be sent to Warsaw and to Bystrzyca Kłodzka. And the feedback was the same - 'please send more from 'Marksa i Spencera bo to się najlepiej sprzedaje' (it sells best).

The result is that by 1989, in what had been a 50-year hiatus in consumer consciousness, Marks and Spencer had sky-high brand recognition and positive association as Poland reopened for business. But what did this British retailer do with this brand capital? It sat on its hands for several years.

It sent an executive, who according to expat lore from the mid-1990s, lived in the Marriott Hotel and sent reports each month to London HQ saying why the Polish market wasn't quite ready yet. Finally a franchised operation was opened in 1998 in a flimsy blaszak (temporary tin building) near Warsaw Central station, selling clothes for literally double the UK prices. Typically clothes unsold in their UK outlets - I'm average size, but could only find trousers and shirts for giants or midgets. Finally, in 2008, M&S entered the market in its own right, with store openings in Złote Tarasy and Domy Handlowe Centrum. Eventually, there were 11 M&S stores across Poland. A mere eleven.

Below: Prime Warsaw locations hardly come primer than Domy Handlowe Centrum, across the tram tracks from Pałac Kultury, seen reflected in the glass frontage.

A survey carried out in 2006 among Warsaw consumers by students from Warsaw Technical University Business School asked about awareness of British brands. Marks & Spencer came top. Number one in an unprompted recall of British brands. Interestingly, most of the top ten were luxury car brands; Tesco - which had a couple of hundred stores at that time to M&S's six came in at number 20. So there we are - a huge opportunity, huge goodwill, squandered. Now M&S will trudge home from Poland, defeated, in the footsteps of other defeated British retailers here, Dixons (as Electroworld), Carpetright, British Home Stores, Topshop and Mothercare. [and as of 2021, Tesco itself]

How will I cope though? The best thing about M&S for me is not having to think. If I need a shirt, socks or underpants, I just go to M&S and buy - office shirts, underpants, socks, trousers (NEVER jeans or anything Blue Harbour - obciach Panie!), the occasional suit. A habit acquired in childhood visits with my mother to the M&S in West Ealing and Ealing Broadway carried over into adult life.

Suits I now buy from Vistula, they have the edge in cut and quality (my last M&S suit consisted of trousers made in Vietnam and a jacket made in Indonesia. Or the other way round). "Guess how many shirts I got ? How many pairs of shoes? How many ties? Shit, I don't know, must be 25 at least" (Quote from Repo Man, one of my favourite cult films). Well, I just counted my M&S shirts. Forty. Plus the one I'm wearing right now. Some of them are more than a bit worn, but I won't part with them. And there must be several more of my M&S shirts at my father's in London.

Socks. Walking 11,000 paces a day puts holes in socks quickly. M&S socks included. I'm feeling, hey, the quality's not what it was, but I never racked up so many kilometres of walking as I'm doing right now. Socks and underpants I can buy elsewhere - but not shirts.

My shirts must be right. Long sleeves - always. A breast pocket for mobile phones, white, 15-and-half inch collar, regular sleeve length - and slim fit. Not tailored, nor regular - slim.  A three-pack of such shirts costs £15.99 in the UK; but the slim-with-breast-pocket is a hard item to find. But since November, there have been NO shirts that fit these requirements in the M&S in Warsaw. Either 18-inch collars, everything else right (slim fit and 18" collar?) or the right fit but no pocket...

So shirts I will continue to buy at M&S in Ealing, I'm there often enough. Jackets and trousers these days I tend to buy exclusively from the Children's Society charity shop on Pitshanger Lane. Here I bought a beautiful M&S trenchcoat secondhand, with all the details - buttons, flaps etc, in Lovat green, for a mere £13.99. And a beautiful M&S leather jacket, styled like a US biker jacket from the 1930s, for £24.99. Why buy new when you can buy nearly new and support a charity?

Food. Son Eddie is a great fan of the M&S food hall in Warsaw, and says that the retailer should have considered just keeping the Simply Food part of its business going here in Poland. Eddie is too cool and hip to wear M&S clothing himself, but the food from there he loves. Me, I can do without, there's plenty of really good food shops in Warsaw right now, the choice has never been better.

Frankly the demise of M&S in Poland will go unnoticed and unmourned by me. It could have been so much different if only the management had attacked the Polish (and indeed the entire Central and Eastern European) market with sufficient determination back in the early 1990s.

But then determination is a characteristic that's disappearing from corporate Britain. It's easier to sit on a sack of money than to manage a business.

This time four years ago:
Along mirror'd canyons

This time six years ago:
Mad about Marmite 

This time seven years ago:
Komorowski wins second round of Presidential elections?

This time eight years ago:
A beautiful summer dusk in Jeziorki

This time nine years ago:
Classic cars, London and Warsaw

Culvert cuts across the tracks

The culvert built under the tracks while the Warsaw-Radom line was being modernised needs to be strengthened so as coal trains can pass over the (non-electrified) line. So in the height of summer, with adequate stocks at Siekierki power station, the coal line has been closed, the culvert - and indeed the line right back to the Okęcie sidings - is being upgraded.

Below: heavy plant has been traversing the fields between ul. Kórnicka and the tracks. Existing footpaths have been ploughed under by the tracks of diggers and cranes.

Below: tracks lifted for the work. It's taking some time, looks like it'll take more to finish. While the work's going on, the new signalling for the coal train line (just behind the culvert) waits to be swivelled 90 degrees into position.

Below: the level crossing at ul. Baletowa. Still no sign of barriers - probably waiting for the track-work to be completed. Note the puddle on the corner of Baletowa and ul. Hołubcowa; there's a lack of a storm drain here. On wet days, pedestrians have to wander across two lanes of traffic to get to the pavement beyond with dry feet. Dangerous. But it looks like drainage is coming.

Below: the culvert under the north end of ul. Trombity where it meets Kórnicka is also being upgraded. Storms are becoming more frequent with greater volumes of rain, so the drainage system must be ready for them.

Below: a photo with much going on. To the right, behind the trees, the end of the S79 (if you click to enlarge you can see the road lighting). Overhead, a USAF C-17 transport plane, one of several of the retinue of Trump what flies into Warsaw later this week. In the distance, centre right, workmen in orange work on the coal line as it crosses over the S2 on its way to Okęcie sidings. And in the middle of frame, the green light announcing the line is clear for the train to take me to work.

Below: my train home this evening, one of the older three-window EN57 electric multiple units still in service, this one having undergone a gentle modernisation just this year.

The glory that is Jeziorki today. Gladly do I get ofp the train at W-wa Dawidy to walk home 3,000 paces this way, rather than continue one stop to W-wa Jeziorki to walk the 1,700 paces home along pavement-free ul. Karczunkowska. Healthier and safer.

UPDATE WEDS 5 JULY: Coal trains are beginning to run again. Saw one this morning, a modernised TEM2/ST48 hauling (on its own) a massive rake of 50 full coal wagons towards Siekierki.

UPDATE THURS 20 JULY: For a few weeks, a train connecting Kraków Główny and Olsztyn Główny, calling at Kielce, Radom, and Warsaw on the way, has been passing through Jeziorki. Below: taken on 14 July at 19:59, this is the InterCity Orłowicz train between W-wa Jeziorki and W-wa Dawidy.

This time last year:
USAF aircraft over Jeziorki ahead of NATO summit

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki's new Biedronka store

This time four years ago:
In the highways and the hedges

This time five years ago
How Warsaw's public transport authority communicates with passengers

This time six years ago:
Farewell to separate alcohol tills at Polish supermarkets

This time seven years ago:
Twin turboprop cargo planes at Okęcie

This time eight years ago:
To the countryside, Czachówek

This time nine years ago:
Why I feel freer in Poland than in the UK

This time ten years ago:

Jeziorki birds - hatchling update

The local waterfowl's breeding period it nearly over. The great crested grebes that I've been observing since mid-May on the southern pond have finally been rewarded with a trio of chicks - I am so pleased for them. It was worth the long wait.

I can see no difference between the chicks of the black-necked grebe and great crested grebe; both have black and white striped heads, with red patches between beak and eyes and a third red patch on the forehead. Like the chicks of the black-necked grebe, the great crested grebe chicks ride around on their parents' backs for the first few weeks of life, spending more time in the water as they mature.

First photo of the great crested grebe after the nest emptied on 27 June. Can you see the little head of a chick between the wings of the mother?

And what's become of the great crested grebes' nest, sat on for the best part of a month? It's now a hang-out for the black-faced gulls!

In the middle pond, the great crested grebe whose eggs hatched three weeks earlier is now swimming around with a chick that's almost her own size.

And now, the mallard ducks. The last of Jeziorki's wildfowl to hatch. Mallards have huge clutches - eight to 13 eggs! This female has a brood of nine chicks (count them! below), by the standards of grebes, a great result. Also taking a month to hatch, ducklings are precocial, able to swim and fend for themselves soon after emerging from the egg. Within two months, they should be fully fledged and able to fly. Unlike grebes, mallards are sexually dimorphic (male and female look quite different) and they can't dive.

Let's take a look at these four ducklings enjoying early life together. May they grow safely into adulthood and return to Jeziorki year after year.

Swan update: on 27 June, I saw all six cygnets with their mother in their nest at the north end of the ponds, below. Since then - no sightings.

Below: cygnet flotilla following mum, dad to the fore, scouting the way.

This time last year:
Brexit: where next for mankind?

This time two years ago:
Three hundred kilometres in a suburban train

This time four years ago:
Serious cycling

This time six years ago:
Outlets for creativity

This time eight years ago:
The day I stopped commuting to work by car

This time nine years ago:
Look up at the Towers of London

This time ten years ago:
Wild deer in the Las Kabacki forest

S7 expressway to link airport and Grójec

I've written about this before, this will be the biggest story for Jeziorki in coming five to six years. I wrote extensively about the construction of the S2/S79 expressways (fully opened on 19 September 2013; work started on 16 September 2009; ground clearance began in January 2009. The S7 contract linking Węzeł Lotnisko to the existing stretch of the S7 north of Grójec (29km) has been divided into three sections (marked A, B and C on the map below); the winning tenders for the contractors who will build them have been announced, but in the Polish way, the losers are appealing the decisions, so it's still not clear when work will start on the S7 extension.

Here's how the whole project looks in a map published by TVN Warszawa, which I overlaid onto Google Maps for greater detail. Click to enlarge.

One thing is certain, like the S2/S79 project, this will change the local landscape to a great degree. It will curtail my walks west of the railway line, it will cut Dawidy Bankowe off from Jeziorki for walkers and off-road two-wheelers, it will bring an end to the peace and quiet that can be enjoyed in these fields, full of cabbage, carrot, potato and onion; fields that are home to hares and lapwings, marsh harriers and larks.

The upside is that getting out of Jeziorki out onto Europe's highways network will take that bit shorter; rather than having to drive 4.5km to the (current) end of the S2 off of busy ul. Puławska, it'll be a hop of less than 2km to Węzeł Zamienie. The 12 minutes it currently takes to get from home to the airport will be cut back to seven or eight. A second upside is that the vast amount of traffic that takes a shortcut through Jeziorki to avoid the jams on Puławska will have a much, much better alternative to get into town. Puławska should also become less congested. And finally, getting out of Warsaw's suburbs and exurbs into open countryside will be quicker, a short hop to Węzeł Złotokłos or Tarczyn Północ (14km and 19km respectively from Węzeł Zamienie).

This will be a massive project. Section A alone, linking the southern stump of Węzeł Lotnisko that currently ends abruptly in a cabbage field and ul. Słoneczna, the road running west out of Piaseczno, 7km long, involves the construction of seven viaducts and two junctions.

Below: photo taken from a plane coming into land at Okęcie airport, April 2016, the southern stump. Since then, a little tidying, but no progress. And all those street lights, illuminating unused asphalt, get switched on every night.

If you're interested in the detail of the works, here's a link to the original project on Siskom's website. It's a large (64MB) .pdf file of the whole extension; it's out of date (there have been amendments to the locations of the junctions), but nevertheless it serves as a useful compendium of information about the S7 extension, worth the couple of minutes it takes to download. And if you are really interested in the expansion of Poland's infrastructure, take in SkyscraperCity.com's Forum Polskich Wieżowców ; the S7 extension (Warsaw to Grójec) is discussed in minute detail, with over 250 pages - at around 20 posts per page - about the project before the tenders have even been decided. The thread was begun in July 2005, 12 years ago!

I'd say that work on clearing the ground will begin this winter, so all the trees that need to be cut down are out of the way before the spring's okres lęgowy - birds' breeding period. (This is of course on the understanding that the contractors won't be taking forever in the courts.) From then on, my guess is that it'll be 2023 before the S7 extension is open all the way from Węzeł Lotnisko to the northern end of the existing expressway at Głuchów.

The question is - what will open first - Section A of the S7, or the as-yet-no-sign-of viaduct carrying ul. Karczunkowska over the railway line by W-wa Jeziorki station?

UPDATE AUGUST 2022: Section A opens.

This time last year:
Metro Wilanowska redevelopment gets under way
(And first anniversary of the L39 bus route to W-wa Jeziorki)

This time threee years ago:
Local politics, local politician

This time four years ago:
Communication breakdown

This time five years ago:
Getting ready for the opening of Modlin airport

This ten nine years ago:
Maybugs in July - a plague of cockchaffers