Łódź City Culture Park – A Wooden City Within the City

Just behind the Central Museum of Textiles, a very different side of Łódź begins. The Łódź City Culture Park brings together eight historic buildings that represent the wooden architecture of the city and its surroundings in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is not a typical open-air museum filled with rural cottages and thatched roofs. Instead, the park recreates a fragment of urban Łódź — a city where wooden houses and small public buildings once stood alongside the factories of the rapidly growing textile industry.

A Wooden Part of Industrial Łódź

The historic buildings were moved here from different parts of Łódź and the surrounding area and arranged along two cobbled streets. The collection includes five wooden houses, a summer villa, a wooden church and a former tram waiting room.

Together, they show a type of architecture that was once a familiar part of Łódź but has largely disappeared from the modern city.

Everyday Life Behind the Wooden Walls

Five of the wooden houses are home to the permanent exhibition Microhistories. Łódź and its People. Instead of focusing only on famous industrialists and grand factories, it tells the story of the city through the everyday lives of its residents.

The exhibition draws on family memories, diaries and oral-history interviews with older inhabitants of Łódź. Reconstructed interiors and workshops bring these personal stories to life, showing how people from different backgrounds lived and worked as the city developed.

The result is a different perspective on Łódź's industrial history. The factories explain how the city grew, while the wooden houses show what everyday life looked like for the people who lived through that transformation.

A Church, a Villa and a Tram Stop

The oldest building in the park is the wooden Church of St. Andrew Bobola, transferred here from Nowosolna. Construction began in 1846, and the historic interior has retained its religious character.

Another distinctive building is a summer villa transferred from Scaleniowa Street in Ruda Pabianicka. Its elaborate architectural details make it one of the most striking buildings in the park.

At the entrance stands a small wooden tram waiting room from the former terminus at Jana Kilińskiego Square in Zgierz. After being dismantled in 1984, it was reconstructed here and preserved as a reminder of the city's early public transport.

A Different Side of Łódź

The park is located directly behind the Central Museum of Textiles and can easily be combined with a visit to the White Factory. Together, the two sites create an interesting contrast: the monumental industrial architecture of Łódź's textile boom on one side and the modest wooden buildings of everyday life on the other.

For us, that contrast is what makes the park special. It shows that the history of industrial Łódź was not made only in factories and palaces. It was also lived out in small wooden houses, workshops and neighbourhoods that have almost disappeared from the city.