Gdansk Street Art and where to find it

Gdansk isn’t a city you immediately think of when someone says ‘street art‘ but as a lover of finding colour everywhere I go, I like to track down some street art in each city if possible. Whilst I did find a couple of pieces in Gdansk (the area around the Post Office Museum in the old town is great for some Polish themed art) if you’re after street art in Gdansk, you’d be better getting a little bit out of the city centre as you won’t find much just wandering around the old town. In this post I’ll tell you the best place we found for street art, and show you some of my favourite pieces we saw. If you’re heading to the city soon, you’ll find everything you need to know before visiting Gdansk in my complete guide to Gdansk post.

Street art celebrating the end of World War 2, Gdansk, and Gdansk’s ‘postal defenders’. This can be found just behind the Post Office Museum

For the best street art in Gdansk, head to Zaspa

Zaspa, about fifteen minutes by train or tram out of the main city, is the best area we found for street art by far. The neighbourhood is built on the site of the old Gdansk airport and after the financial crisis in the 80s the area became run down and had a lot of problems. To try to fix this, the city commissioned some street artists to paint on the buildings, adding colour and personality and a cooler vibe to the area. They call this outdoor gallery the Monumental Art Collection. Now Zaspa is an up and coming area with, judging by the amounts of schools we saw, a large population of young families, it was designed to be an area that had everything it’s residents needed and from what we saw, I think they managed that.

Zaspa is full of high rise buildings, and there’s amazing pieces on the end of each building. You can walk round a relatively small area and see absolutely loads of street art. It was cold when we went so we walked round a couple of blocks but on a sunny day you could do a fair few hours of exploring Zaspa.

Yes, if you only have 48 hours in Gdansk then visiting Zaspa might not be something you get around to, but being totally honest, you can probably get there, back, and have a wander around seeing some of the art within two hours if you’re speedy. It was absolutely worth the journey out of the city in the freezing cold for me and I would’ve still gone on a shorter trip, but then I really do love street art.

Photographs of some of my favourite pieces are in this post, even more are over on my Instagram, but the one you really must see, the most famous piece, is the pixelated face of Lech Walesa, leader of Solidarity, which was painted by artist Piotr Szwabe to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Lech winning the Nobel Peace Prize.