Warsaw by bicycle, Saturday, 1 August 2026
I left the house in Wawer without much of a plan.
I didn’t want to make art, even if I could. I would not stop and arrange the city inside a frame. I would take photographs as I moved: buildings, crossings, adverts, bridges, people, petrol stations and walls. Click, click, click. Whatever appeared beside me as I moved.
It was an ordinary Saturday in an extraordinary place.
Or perhaps it was the other way around.
1. Outside the House
The journey began where most journeys begin: outside the front door.
Nothing dramatic. A bicycle, a road, a house behind me. The quiet knowledge that movement was possible.
That morning, leaving meant turning the pedals.
2. Wawer
Wawer does not announce itself.
Houses sit behind fences. Cars wait in driveways. Trees lean over narrow streets. Somebody has built something too large beside something very small.
The suburbs are full of private worlds.
You pass them without entering.
3. Breakfast
I stopped at the local café and ordered a sandwich and coffee.
A body needs breakfast before it needs meaning.
This was one of the quieter lessons of the day. Many emotional crises are also physical events: exhaustion, heat, hunger, adrenaline and sleeplessness gathering inside the body until they begin speaking in the language of catastrophe.
The sandwich did not solve anything.
It helped.
4. The Church
I passed the church.
Warsaw is full of buildings that promise another world while occupying a great deal of this one. Their towers rise above housing estates, tramlines, kebab shops and pharmacies.
I sometimes envy religious certainty.
Then I continue cycling.
5. Towards Saska Kępa
The road opened towards Saska Kępa.
The bicycle changes the scale of Warsaw. In a car, the city becomes traffic. On a bus, it becomes a route. On a bicycle, it becomes a sequence of surfaces: shade, broken pavement, a sudden smell of food, the side of a building you have never noticed before.
You are not outside the city looking at it.
You are moving through its skin.
6. Francuska
People sat outside cafés. Dogs waited beneath tables. Someone pushed a pram. Someone else was late.
The city was not performing Warsaw for me.
It was getting on with its Saturday.
7. Poniatowski Bridge
I crossed the Poniatowski Bridge.
Below me, the Vistula moved through the city without joining it. Warsaw rises on both sides, but the river keeps its own time.
That day, I was simply a person on an old bicycle.
It was enough.
8. The National Stadium
The stadium appeared, monumental and slightly unreal.
Cities build enormous containers for collective emotion: stadiums, churches, parliaments, concert halls. We enter them hoping to become part of something larger than ourselves.
For ninety minutes, sometimes it works.
Then everybody goes home.
9. Aleje Jerozolimskie
I cycled into the centre along Aleje Jerozolimskie.
The name itself contains a journey: Jerusalem Avenue.
The street is loud with traffic and commerce.
History does not disappear.
It learns to stand behind advertising.
10. The Palm Tree
The artificial palm tree stood at the roundabout as it always does, absurd and completely at home.
A tropical tree in central Warsaw. A joke that became a landmark. Something foreign that the city eventually adopted as part of itself.
Perhaps belonging begins like that.
First you look ridiculous.
Then people use you to give directions.
11. The New Centre
The streets around the centre are changing.
More space for pedestrians. Shops, trainers, glass, coffee and people moving without cars pressing immediately against them.
Warsaw repeatedly demolishes itself and begins again. Sometimes through war. Sometimes through ideology. Sometimes through property development.
It has difficulty leaving things alone.
That may be one reason I like it so much.
12. Walls
I photographed murals, graffiti, advertisements and the blank sides of buildings.
Walls are supposed to separate things.
In Warsaw, they speak.
They remember football clubs, dead musicians, political arguments, private declarations of love and commercial promises to improve your skin.
The city writes over itself every night.
13. The Old Town
I reached the Old Town as the anniversary commemorations were beginning.
On 1 August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began. Eighty-two years later, people had gathered in the reconstructed streets wearing uniforms, carrying flags and remembering those who fought.
The Old Town itself is a kind of photograph made solid.
Destroyed, reconstructed, remembered.
14. The Young Insurgents
Teenagers were dressed as Home Army fighters.
I asked whether I could take their photograph. They smiled and agreed.
For a moment, history was young again.
They were not pretending to have suffered what others suffered. They were keeping the shapes of memory visible: the armband, the cap, the posture, the anchor painted on a wall.
Memory needs bodies.
Otherwise, it becomes architecture.
15. The Motorcyclists
Members of the Hells Angels had come to pay tribute to those murdered in Wola.
Motorcycles, leather, flags, feathers, engines and silence.
The combination should have seemed theatrical. It did not.
People carry respect in the forms available to them.
16. Five O’Clock
At five o’clock, the sirens sounded.
Warsaw stopped.
Cars halted. People stood still. Conversations ended. For one minute, the ordinary city suspended itself.
This is the part of Poland I have always understood: the insistence that some things must be remembered together.
Not necessarily because the past offers a usable lesson.
Because the dead once stood where we stand.
17. A British Voice
Near Sigismund’s Column, I heard a woman speaking in an unmistakably British accent about “us Poles.”
The phrase contained two countries without contradiction.
She sounded entirely British and entirely Polish.
The categories did not need resolving.
People are often more complicated than the nations that claim them.
18. Towards the River
I left the crowds and moved back towards the Vistula.
The ceremony receded behind me. The city returned to bicycles, traffic lights, summer clothes and decisions about dinner.
This is what happens after remembrance.
Life resumes.
That is not betrayal.
It is the reason remembrance matters.
19. Beneath the Bridge
I stopped at a bar near a bridge and ordered a beer.
The riverbank was warm and loose with Saturday evening. People sat in groups. Music floated from somewhere. The bridge crossed above us with the heavy confidence of infrastructure.
Then the weather changed.
A southern storm moved over Warsaw. Rain struck the tables. Everybody gathered their belongings and moved inside.
The city briefly became water.
20. The Road Home
By then, I had been moving for hours.
My phone contained buildings, faces, bridges, flags, motorbikes, walls and accidental fragments of other people’s lives.
Nothing had been resolved.
Warsaw had not become a good city or a bad city. I had not decided to love it or leave it. It had simply allowed itself to be seen.
Not judgment. Not possession. Not the demand that something reveal its final meaning.
A bicycle journey across a city.
A tired body still moving.
The ordinary is not what remains when nothing important happens.
The ordinary is where everything happens.
Warsaw is the city I live in.
The city I love. The city I resent. The city I understand. The city I will never understand.
On Saturday, 1 August 2026, I crossed it on a bicycle and took photographs without stopping.
The city did not explain itself.
And did not need to.
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