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.