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Due to Huge Economic Growth, Emigrants Are Back to This Country
Not long ago, they were quite poor, and newspapers mocked one of their largest cities, saying “the whole place moved to London.”
It was almost 10 years ago, and I started dating a girl* from a country that I had little knowledge about back then.
She told me she was from a city called Lodz (that is not really how you write the name of this place, but I cannot find the special characters here on this keyboard). I googled the city and found an article from the British tabloid The Sun (one of the best-selling British newspapers). The headline?
The Polish city that’s moved to Britain.
The article, later removed from the newspaper website after the city mayor threatened to sue them, had some grim descriptions of the place, like:
Derelict buildings, boarded-up businesses, crumbling masonry — the poor and elderly getting in line to buy bread.
Or
On Piotrkowska Street, which at three miles long is one of the longest high streets in the world, the cobbled thoroughfare is empty even in the middle of the day,
Or
Half the adult population has left the city,” one Lodz inhabitant tells, They are in Scotland, London, and Bournemouth, where they have a beautiful flat, a nice TV, a car — things we cannot have here.
Scary, right?
While containing some exaggerations, the article was right at one point: indeed many people left Lodz during the first decade of this century. The population fell from nearly 850 thousand in the 1990s to less than 700.000. Most of those who left were working, productive adults.
But this wasn’t just something that happened in Lodz; it happened all over the country.
Because Poland was not a good place to live back then — at least not when compared to most of the countries whose doors were open when the nation gained access to the European Union.
But the trend has changed in the last 5 years.
