Region

Lodz Region

The Lodz region (Lodzkie) sits close to the exact center of Poland, and its identity comes almost entirely from one city, Lodz, the country's great textile boomtown.

Lodz grew explosively in the nineteenth century as mills and workers' housing spread across the plain, and that heritage now defines its appeal: the long Piotrkowska Street lined with tenements, the red-brick factories, and Manufaktura, a former mill complex reborn as a culture and shopping quarter. The city is also home to Poland's renowned national film school.

The surrounding region is flat and agricultural, useful mainly as a fast connection: Lodz sits at the crossing of Poland's main north-south and east-west routes, roughly an hour and a half from Warsaw by train.

Lodz is the base and the reason to come; a day or an overnight covers Piotrkowska, the factories and the street art the city is known for.

Destinations

Łódź

Poland's former textile capital, a raw nineteenth-century boomtown of brick mills and merchant palaces now given over to design, film and street art.

Places to see

Attraction

Piotrkowska Street

One of the longest commercial streets in Europe, the four-kilometre spine of Łódź, lined with the facades of its textile-era barons.

Attraction

Manufaktura

A vast nineteenth-century textile mill converted into a cultural, dining and shopping quarter around a huge public square.

Attraction

EC1 Łódź

The city's first power station, converted into a hands-on science centre and one of Central Europe's most advanced planetariums.

Nature

Orientarium Zoo Łódź

A modern zoo pavilion built around a South-East Asian theme, with an underwater tunnel running beneath a shark and ray tank.

Attraction

Księży Młyn

A preserved 19th-century factory district built as a city within a city, with red-brick mills, workers' terraces and the Scheibler palace.

Museum

Izrael Poznański Palace (Museum of the City of Łódź)

The largest industrialist's residence in Poland, built for the Poznański cotton dynasty and now the city museum.

Museum

Muzeum Sztuki (ms²)

One of the world's earliest modern-art museums, whose ms² branch shows its avant-garde collection inside a converted Manufaktura mill.

Museum

Central Museum of Textiles (White Factory)

A textile museum inside Łódź's landmark White Factory, telling the city's story through the fabric that built it.

Restaurant

Anatewka

A long-standing Jewish restaurant off Piotrkowska Street, drawing on family recipes and Łódź's pre-war heritage.

Frequently asked questions

Central Poland's textile country, defined by Lodz, which grew from a village into a manufacturing giant in the nineteenth century. Its red-brick mills and Piotrkowska Street now house design, film and street art.

Piotrkowska Street, the Manufaktura complex in Izrael Poznanski's old mills, and the city's film school and arts scene.

Lodz sits almost in the geographic centre of the country, about an hour and a half from Warsaw by train.