Nova Huta

Nowa Huta could not be more different from fairytale Krakow. Built as a piece of Communist propaganda to “house the people” in a garden city, it sprang up at an alarming speed during the late 1940s. At its peak, the area housed 100,000 residents among its wide boulevards, public parks and regimented apartment blocks all designed in the architectural style of the day, Socialist Realism. As with many idealistic plans, the Soviet dream town was never completed, and Nowa Huta became a hotbed of political rebellion during the Solidarity strikes of the early 1980s. Today it is one of Krakow’s biggest suburbs, the Orwellian home to 200,000 people, largely composed of rows of pre-fab apartment blocks (ironically added after the demise of Communism), a steel mill with vast entry gates and imposing office blocks flanking open piazzas.