I had been several times to Kraków, the ancient capital of Poland, but never before to Nowa Huta, which lies six miles away to the east. Kraków is famous for its great central square, its sixteenth-century Cloth Hall, and the many radiating streets filled with sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings. On Sunday 12 May, I set off on foot from Kraków along the banks of the Vistula, in the company of Ewa, a professor of English at the Jagiellonian University – but also a long-term resident of Nowa Huta. The very name Nowa Huta (literally, ‘New Foundry’) has a specific resonance in Poland – it evokes an architectural project designed and built as the epitome of a communist utopian city, and intended as a model for the rest of the nation. A distance of six miles was all that separated the centre of Polish tradition from the launch site of a permanent revolution that was to last forty-odd years.

Add on the extra thirty-five years since the Solidarity uprising, and the sun was out, the river boats were busy, the banks were overgrown with mugwort and wild chervil, and the breeze was carrying airborne seed heads everywhere. The main path was full of joggers and cyclists, but never mind: the turf was better nearer the water’s edge. Ewa identified numerous plants in Polish while I struggled to remember their names in English. On the face of it, the Krakówians have judged the river and its setting not worth bothering about, except as an artery for trade. Nearly all the buildings clustered near the eastern bank are apartment ...