Poland's wall painting is unusually good, and the reason is design. The Polish School of Posters — the state-commissioned graphic work of the 1950s to 1980s, which had to say things obliquely and got very good at it — trained several generations in exactly the skills a mural needs: scale, a single idea, and colour that carries from across a street.

Łódź is where that legacy is most visible. The city grew enormous on textiles in the nineteenth century, lost the industry, and was left with a stock of blank firewalls and one of Europe's longest commercial streets. The Urban Forms foundation turned those walls into a collection rather than a scattering, and it is now among the largest curated mural holdings anywhere.

The rest of the country is not short of it either. Warsaw, Gdańsk and the Silesian cities all carry substantial work, much of it painted into the same post-industrial fabric — the housing estates and factory ends that are the default Polish canvas.

Trains connect the major cities well, and Łódź sits close enough to Warsaw to be a day trip, though it rewards longer.