Towers of Gdańsk

February 2, 2026February 1, 2026Leave a comment

Do you like towers? Gdańsk has plenty. When I got up from my late afternoon nap (getting old) it was already after 5:30 so I calculated how much daytime there was left to sketch as much as possible, and so here’s what I did. First I went through the big gateway at the end of Długa and stood by the busy Okopowa main road, looking up at the imposing tower of, er, that place I mentioned a couple of posts ago, Przedbramie ulicy Długiej. Well the bit in front, that’s the Torture House. It was not torture to draw though, I long to sketch these types of buildings. Not torture houses, I mean, just big impressive buildings with interesting towers and not too many windows. The sky was a delight; you don’t know how refreshing it is to come to Europe and draw these dramatic skies after so many boring blue skies in California. In Davis we either have months of blue, or a few months of fog with blue days in between, and relatively few of the sort of cloudy-blue sky days I grew up with. I like painting them, but they are more interesting when there is some cool city scene below them. Often I decided not to colour the buildings in (sometimes I colour those in later if I haven’t the time, or not if I can’t be bothered) but all of these were coloured there and then, to capture what my eyes were telling me. Poland, well this part of Europe in general, has some of the most incredible towers, not just church steeples but on the civic buildings the most, and I especially love the green copper towers, they remind me of the ones I saw all over Copenhagen when I first arrived there in 1995.

This is the view down Ulica Długa towards the big town hall / museum of Gdansk building that I drew the previous night. It’s such a massive impressive building, I ended up drawing it three times from three different angles. It’s a popular and busy street this, always decked out in flags of the city of Gdańsk. I saw a number of historical photos of Długa, including one from after Nazi Germany invaded and Hitler paraded down here, with swastikas draped from these very buildings. I got many more reminders of those dark moments of history on this trip, especially while walking around Berlin, but the last time I was in Poland 27 years before I had visited Auschwitz, and that disturbed me so deeply, I never want to go back. Długa (Long Lane; Langegasse in German) was laid out in the 13th century and forms part of the ‘Royal Route’, but many of the big stone buildings are 16th century, though many were severely damaged in 1945 and rebuilt later. I stood out of the way next to a restaurant to sketch behind a lamp-post. I could have spent the rest of the evening sketching the old buildings along Długa but I wanted to go into the Old Town, and draw some more towers.

The tall brick tower above is called the Jacek Tower, and I stood next to a newspaper kiosk to draw it while the light was still good. It was next to a very ornate looking market hall that at first I thought was a train station, called ‘Hala Targowa’; on another day I would be sketching that place. Speaking of shops, one of the place I loved most in Poland were the Zabka convenience stores, which were everywhere. And I was well pleased for it. They always seemed to pop up just when I needed a snack or a cold drink, and it was while sketching this that I got what might be my favourite fizzy drink – Pineapple Pepsi Max. Those who know me know full well that I love a Pepsi Max, and I also loved Lilt, the pineapple and grapefruit drink that used to have those great Jamaican music adverts back in the 90s. Sadly Lilt is no more. However in Poland they have Pineapple Pepsi Max, and that may have been the discovery of the trip for me. Ok technically it is ‘Pepsi Zero Sugar’ like it was renamed in the US, but I still call it Pepsi Max. They have Mango Pepsi Max too, but that wasn’t as good as Pineapple. Anyway Jacek Tower (Baszta Jacek) was built in the 15th century as part of the medieval city’s fortifications, and you can still see a lot of bullet holes in the brickwork. ‘Jacek’ is Jacek Odrowąż, aka Saint Hyacinth of Poland, who was a priest and missionary in the 13th century. Yes yes I also thought about Hyacinth Bucket when I read the name, and that the tower was really keeping up appearances, ok that’s out of the way. Apparently there is a Polish phrase that goes, “Święty Jacku z pierogami!”, which means “Saint Hyacinth and his Dumplings!”, which means, well, it’s probably the Polish version of “Gordon Bennett!” or maybe even “I Don’t Believe It!” (wait, wrong show). I decided to draw this in pencil, but actually wish I’d gone for pen, like the other sketches I’d been doing. I was just really taken by the late evening sunlight still bathing the tower against the sky. Still, I wanted to press on and draw some more towers before dark. They were the only parts of the buildings the sun was still shining on.

The next two above were drawn in quick succession, very close to the Jacek Tower. The first one is the tower of the ridiculously tall Muzeum Nauki Gdańskiej (I had to concentrate writing that down), which was another big museum, this time of Science. I would very much have liked to spend some time in there and was ruing my limited days in the city, but life is only so long and I had a symposium to get to the next day. It was tall though. Actually I think the museum was just part of the building, as the tower was part of a large church called St. Catherine’s (or Kościół Rektorski Ojców Karmelitów pw. św. Katarzyny, and yeah I had to look that up because there was no way I was writing all that down in my sketchbook). There was a statue nearby of a famous 17th century astronomer and native of Gdansk, Jan Heweliusz (Johannes Hevelius). That statue and the little park it is in sit before the old town hall building (Ratusz Staromiejski) which houses the ‘Nadbałtyckie Centrum Kultury’ (I wrote that down from the sign above the door) which means ‘Baltic Sea Cultural Center’. My Polish guesswork is getting slightly better, it must have been the Pineapple Pepsi Max. The sky was absolutely positively going towards night-time now, so I headed back to my hotel for a brief rest before some night-time sketching (see my last post). I was satisfied with my sketchbooking, but there’s always more.

The next morning, after not sleeping very well (nice hotel, uncomfortable bed) I had planned to get a few hours of drawing in before my train, but noticed it was raining so had a lie-in. After a leisurely breakfast and a short workout in the gym I went out to stand in a doorway and draw the big old Ratusz Głównego Miasta tower again, this time from behind some pretty buildings. One place I didn’t sketch, the huge basilica across from my hotel, but it was so big I thought, leave it, next time. Givent hat it was 27 years since my previous trip to Poland there’s no knowing when ‘next time’ will be but the Pineapple Pepsi Max is a pretty big draw. I was getting a few raindrops on me while sketching this, so took my book back to my hotel room and painted it while sat at a desk, much comfier. Then I walked out to the train station, Gdańsk Główny. This was yet another beautiful building, though I was most disappointed not to find any Pineapple Pepsi Max in the building and had to make do with another less satisfying fizzy drink for my journey to Poznan. I am glad I arrived early, as it was a little confusing as to where my train would be leaving from, but I still had time to do a quick sketch of the station (below). I mean, I have sketched some train stations in my time but this one is pretty nice, from a tie when cities took real pride in how they looked to visitors. And that was my brief trip to Gdansk, now on to Poznan, and I should stop forgetting the little accent above the ‘n’ (I do have to copy-paste it every time, bloody WordPress editor not having the Special Characters button any more, and I don’t have a Polish keyboard). I told my mum and sister about Gdansk, and they must have been impressed because they came here themselves for a short city-break just after Christmas, taking the pirate ship, walking about the old town, and even getting a massive snowstorm that made everything look Christmassy (and presumably very slippery). I would come back to Gdansk, and maybe explore the shipyards and museums a bit more, but well, I want to go everywhere and draw everything.

And if you thought that I was travelling to a new city and not sketching a fire hydrant…well you’re wrong, here is one I sketched right after drawing the first sketch in this post. It’s a tower after all. The hydrants here are tall and more like ornate bollards. Stay tuned for my sketches of Poznań!

danzig in the moonlight

February 1, 2026February 1, 20262 Comments

Continuing with the Gdansk sketches from last summer’s Poland adventure. I loved all the big spires, of which Gdansk had so many. On the first night there, before going to bed, I sat out on Długi Targ (‘Long Market’), the nice town square at the end of Długa and looked up at the very tall tower of the main town hall building, the Ratusz Głównego Miasta, which is the Museum of Gdańsk. I wish I’d made time to go inside, there were a few museums I came across that I never had time to explore. I was staying there for two nights, but really it was just one full day (of sketching, pirate shipping and napping), since I arrived in the evening and left in the morning. You can’t do it all. I decided to draw the tower in pencil and watercolour rather than the usual paint, I wanted to mix it up a bit on this trip, and also change my perspective from landscape to very tall portrait. It was night-time but I had good light to draw in, and could lean on the stone wall of the steps I was standing on, with the winged lady sculpture in the foreground. I enjoyed sketching this, and for a summer evening in a good-sized European city and tourist destination it was remarkably chilled out. I was frustrated with the new Moleskine paper and the way it made the paint bead up in those little divots, it was not the texture I was going for but it’s all part of the story now. I was determined not to stop using the book, having started it, but since this was my main symposium book I just figured that if I want to finish it then I need to draw loads more to try and complete it. I’m a completist like that, and when I’ve had annoying sketchbooks in the past I have, by the end of it, come around to their charms, but not in this case. It might be the last watercolour Moleskine I use, after 29 of them, but maybe I will find one with the old paper in (in my scary art cupboard of endless not-yet-started sketchbooks and bags of still-ok pens I must have one hidden). This sketch really pleases me though, and given how I post so many landscape panoramas in this sketchblog format that end up looking tiny, it’s nice to show one where you can really see it, and have to scroll down to see the bottom. Of the sketch, not the sculpture, whose bottom was hidden. I liked drawing in pencil too, but it has to be the right pencil. I did get quite a few types of Blackwing before I left, but they end up being too soft on this paper and I end up using an old Staedtler (though I picked up a Leuchtturm pencil at the Symposium that I really love, so far). I tried to sketch in pencil more on this trip, but it’s fun when doing these night architecture sketches which need to be quicker.

Here is another night-time looking-up sketch that I did on my second evening. I have a load more sketches I did in between my later afternoon nap and this point, but I’ll post them separately. I wasn’t kidding when I said I sketched a lot. This is another pencil and watercolour at night sketch, and I stood at the corner of Ul. Piwna and Kołodziejska, a short walk from my hotel. Quite a few people out passing by, and my light was not great, but I wanted to look up at this magnificent building which is called the Great Armoury, or Wielka Zbrojownia. Sometimes I look at a building and think, if I draw this with my usual pen and try to get all this detail in, I’ll make a right dogs dinner of it and not always like the look of it afterwards, thinking of the effort and the awkwardness of looking up. As it happens I drew in pencil and focused on what stood out the most – the building’s colours and the contrast with the night sky – and I propped my paintbox in a lit shop window to see what I was doing. As I sketched, I did get interrupted by a nun with a suitcase. My first thoughts were ‘spy movie’ and I was hoping to hear some elliptical spy passphrase like “When the squirrel eats marmalade, it rains lemons in Bucharest” or something (and yes I know “elliptical” isn’t the right word but it sounded right when I wrote it, and still does). She just asked me where the train station was. I am not a Catholic but was brought up to be helpful and polite to nuns, and especially Polish ones because the Pope was from Poland. I explained I am not local, but looked it up on my phone and gave her directions. It was quite late in the evening to be catching a train, but who am I to question a spy, or a nun for that matter. Besides I was catching a train myself the next morning so needed to look it up anyway.

When I was done with that sketch I saw there was a little bar opposite that looked interesting, and had good music coming out of it. It was called ‘Joseph K. bar’ and had a really cool vibe about it, plus loads to sketch. I stood in line for my beer and got a nice dark Polish beer whose name I have forgotten. Polish beer, like Czech beer, is really nice and I especially like the dark beer. I sketched on this sofa, because I have never sketched enough, and had a chat with a nice English guy who passed by to have a look. I liked how colourful this place was, but it was just really relaxed, and a short walk back to my hotel.

Let’s Gdańsk

January 31, 20262 Comments

Time, finally, to post my sketches from last summer in Poland. This is what I should have done in September, but I was busy, then I was busy in October, very busy in November, December’s a write-off, and well January is almost finished. See how quickly time flies. While I was in Poland I kept a daily diary, which I have not been doing for years, but I did so because I knew I’d probably post months later and forget all the details. Now I have forgotten where that diary is. I’ll do my best. I have always wanted to go to Gdańsk (which I may or may not write with the little accent above the n), since I knew it was an important port in the Solidarity era of the 80s, and also a really pretty Hanseatic city on the Baltic Sea. I had this idea over twenty years ago that I would like to do a tour of the whole Baltic, starting and finishing in Copenhagen, exploring all the different but connected cities and cultures along its shores, and drawing them too. It’s something I’ll never get around to (and I will probably never get to visit St. Petersburg) but it’s a fun dream project. Gdańsk was one of the big attractions of that project. It seemed like a lot of people didn’t really know about it, though it’s more popular today. When I heard that the Urban Sketching Symposium would be in Poland in 2025 (in Poznań), I knew I had to take the opportunity to attend and finally visit Gdańsk, so I booked a couple of nights at a nice hotel in the city centre and flew over from London. I was definitely not disappointed, and my sketchbook got a lot of exercise. I had been dreaming of drawing the view above, the view from the banks of the Motława river, with the big pirate ship (one of two that give tours) moored on the quai. I woke up early to go and sketch this, taking about two and a half hours to draw it all, though I did bump into a couple of urban sketchers from the US who I’ve known for years (Amber Sausen and Daniel Green) which was really nice. I was surprised not to see more sketchers about, since many of us who were in Poland for the symposium were doing our tours of the country before the big event. There was a big pre-symposium meeting hosted by the local USk group on the weekend before, that I missed. I enjoyed sketching this, a big relaxing panorama, but it was a lot of windows, and a beautiful day. I wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere, but my mind does sometimes go to all the places I miss out on seeing because I’m sat there sketching. When I was done, I walked down the river a little bit more to draw one of Gdansk’s most well-known buildings, the tall 15th century crane standing high above the river. It was built in 1444 – it was destroyed in 1945 in the Siege of Gdansk (quite a lot went down in that year) but it was restored in the 50s, and then completely renovated just a few years ago. I stood in the ever-decreasing shade next to the moving footbridge (it swivels in the middle of the river to let the big ship pass by).

I had arrived in Gdansk the evening before, and this was my first time back in Poland since 1998. The country has changed an enormous amount since then, but so have I. Poland is so much more modern than it was in the 1990s, but so am I, with my iPhone and my credit card. I went to an ATM to get some cash out at the airport when I landed, but the options of denominations were confusing; I would have ended up taking out hundreds of dollars without realizing it, but I noticed the exchange rate and decided against. I exchanged some dollars at a bureau de change, so I at least had some cash (I was shortchanged by 20 zloty, though that isn’t much), but everywhere took credit cards even for small purchases so I hardly used any cash while I was in Poland, unlike in Berlin where a lot of places said ‘cash only’. Meanwhile back in 1998 I had all my cash for the trip in a little plastic tube around my neck, I had no phone, a cheap film camera and a small backpack with a few changes of clothes for a five week trip around 12 countries. I travelled light enough in 2025 though, but I had more sketching supplies. I didn’t sketch much in the 90s, but I wrote a lot on that trip. As soon as I left my hotel to walk about in the evening I was in love with the city, and knew I’d enjoy my time in Poland (which I really did). I had expected it to be full of drunken tourists from the north of England (not just the north, other regions’ drunken tourists are available), or huge groups of American college kids but it was full of Polish families, many with young with kids, visiting from other regions of Poland. Poland, by the way, is a really big country, much bigger than you think. I could spend a few weeks exploring it all and see a real diversity of cities and regions. In fact I realized that I actually knew very little about those regions, which was highlighted when I went for lunch that day at a ‘Kashubian’ restuarant near my hotel. I wondered where Kashubia was, I thought it was maybe in the Caucasus or somewhere, until I realized like an ignorant tourist that I was actually in Kashubia, and this was the local food. After a bit of reading I discovered that Gdansk actually is not technically in Kashubia, with that region being just to the west, but it’s still considered Kashubian. For a long time Gdansk was ‘Danzig’, a German-speaking Prussian city, but that’s just one part of this interesting city’s long and complex history.

The first sketch I did in the city was of that pirate ship down on the river. Yes, I realize my ignorance of tall-masted boats by calling it a pirate ship, but hey I like pirates, I used to dress up as a pirate and go to the Swashbuckler’s Ball in Portland, and this my friends is a pirate ship. Standing on the quai in quickly fading light I could not get super detailed, but I was very excited to have this be my first sketch in Poland. The first of many, a great many. You can see though that the horrible new watercolour Moleskine paper gives it a rough and bumpy feel, it wasn’t much fun to draw on either, and I’m not using those Moleskines any more (unless I can find some with the older, slightly smoother blend of paper), I’ll stick with the Hahnemühles. On this trip I brought both brands, a landscape Moleskine and a portrait Hahnemuhle (the umlaut was there but it kept rolling off), you can see I used the smoother but still slightly textured Hahnemuhle for the crane sketch. That’s enough paper talk, maybe I will do a post about my materials for this trip another time.

As a pirate, and wearing my Portland Timbers football shirt, I naturally had to take a trip on the pirate ship. There are two of them, and the one I drew the night before was called the ‘Czarna Perła’ which I think means ‘Black Pearl, and if that’s not a pirate ship name then my name is Kapitan Jacek Wróbel. This was my tourist time, I wasn’t going to sketch (except for that very quick one above – I can’t help myself, but look at that bumpy paper, it looks dirty but it’s not). I went from the cool shade to the sunny deck to enjoy the view as we toured up the river towards the historic shipyards. I got a nice big beer, and we were told all the stories about Gdansk’s maritime history, its importance as a Hanseatic League city, its shipbuilding industry, and as the birthplace of the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement led by the magnificently moustached labour leader Lech Wałęsa. I remember hearing about him on the news as a kid in the 80s, and he appeared to be a lion of a man. It was in these shipyards that the old Soviet bloc started to fall, and Gdansk is very proud of their role in history. I didn’t get off the ship at the destination in Westerplatte to explore and sketch the big old shipyard cranes, instead I stayed on the pirate ship to have another beer and listen to the Polish folk singer with his guitar, I sketched him in the small brown sketchbook below. He was really good. There is a little bit of industrial architecture in the background.

Below is a sketch I did on the fairly busy main pedestrian street of Długa, the ‘Long Lane’ I enjoyed all the flags, but I kept this quick and sketchy. It leads up to the ‘Golden Gate’ (Brama Złota), but the tall tower you see in the distance is the, wait let me look this one up, it’s called the ‘Przedbramie ulicy Długiej’. Now one thing I must point out, I am usually pretty good with European languages and do a fairly passable job with pronunciations, but when I see Polish my brain just says ‘leave it Pete, you’ve embarrassed yourself enough!’. I had this Berlitz European Phrase Book when I was a kid and I got my head around Hungarian and Russian, but sheepishly slowed the book when I would read the Polish pages. I love hearing the language, listening to people speak it was beautiful, and I really appreciate its consonant heavy words and those letters with diacritics you don’t see anywhere else (like that l with a line through it that sounds like a ‘w’). If I ever get a chance to take some Polish lessons where I can hear it and say the words out loud, I would like to do it. Reading it though I get a block, because I have to hear it out loud (I have a similar issue with Irish, even though it’s actually a more phonetic written language than English; it’s probably why I can’t read music). So when I see ‘Przedbramie ulicy Długiej’ I know it’s not really that difficult, but my brain says its deep water and you can’t swim well, so can you look up the English name? Well, it looks like it is called the ‘Foregate of Long Lane’ but part of the building is the ‘Katownia’ or, er, ‘Torture Chamber’. Moving swiftly on. The other part of this sketch is just what I could draw while eating my Kashubian lunch, which incidentally was chicken soup with dumplings (they love a dumpling here), followed by potato ‘plince’ with cream cheese and trout. It was delicious. I enjoyed it so much I went back to the hotel and had a two hour nap. I must have needed it!

I have quite a lot more Gdańsk sketches to share before we get to the Poznań stories, but first I have to show the in-flight sketch from Stansted to Gdańsk, reading Agatha Christie on Ryanair like a boss. I watched Poland unfold below me and wanted to visit each village, though I knew I’d never be able to pronounce their names. Check back for part two.

petescully

postcards of the hanging

Tag: gdansk

Towers of Gdańsk

danzig in the moonlight

Let’s Gdańsk