Complex history of Poles in London
Few European cities carry as deep a Polish imprint as London. The story of Polish immigration to the UK stretches across more than three centuries, from a Soho tavern named after a Polish king in the 1680s, through nineteenth-century insurgents, the wartime government-in-exile that ran a free Poland from a Mayfair address, the Resettlement Act of 1947 that gave citizenship to a quarter of a million displaced soldiers, and the post-2004 wave that turned Polish into the second most spoken language in Britain. This guide traces the London Polish population through these layers, drawing on archival material, academic studies and institutional records. For families researching their own ancestors, every wave left documents, parish books, military rolls and association records that can still be located today.
Early Polish presence in London from medieval trade to Poland Street
The first Polish presence in London grew out of trade and religion long before any large community formed. From the sixteenth century, Polish grain, furs and timber moved through the Eastland Company route from Gdańsk to the Pool of London, and Polish merchants, clerics and diplomats followed the cargo. One early figure, the cleric Jan Łaski (1499–1560), worked as superintendent of the Strangers’ Church in London around 1550 and influenced the early Church of England under Edward VI. Shakespeare’s references to “polacks” in Hamlet, and the name Polonius, are sometimes traced to a Polish source the political treatise of Wawrzyniec Goślicki, translated into English in 1598.
A more visible trace appeared in Soho. After King Jan III Sobieski led the relief of Vienna in 1683, a tavern called The King of Poland opened on the south side of Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street, and the side street running off it took the name Poland Street by 1689¹. In the eighteenth century Polish Protestants escaping the Counter-Reformation settled in the area. The Polish ambassador lived at No. 49 Poland Street between 1786 and 1788². The street still carries the name today, the oldest material record of Polish Londoners.
Political exile and the Great Emigration in the nineteenth century
Polish immigration to the UK changed character after the partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795 erased the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the map. The failed November Uprising of 1830–31 against Russian rule, and the January Uprising of 1863, sent waves of officers, intellectuals and gentry into exile across Europe. London, alongside Paris, became a refuge for what is known as the Wielka Emigracja, the Great Emigration.
By the late nineteenth century London had joined Zurich and Vienna as a centre of Polish political life, especially on the left. Józef Piłsudski, later the first Marshal of independent Poland, stayed in Leytonstone in east London after escaping detention in St Petersburg. The journal Przedświt (Pre-Dawn) was published in Whitechapel for several years, edited from 1898 to 1903 by Leon Wasilewski, who would become independent Poland’s first foreign minister in 1918. Polish émigrés also fought alongside British forces in the Crimean War.
The 1891–1893 census period recorded around 73,000 Russian and Polish immigrants in the UK, although the figures are blended together because the Russian Empire then governed most of Polish territory. Many were Jewish refugees from the partitioned lands, settling in the East End, and the boundary between Polish and Russian-Jewish identity in those records is rarely clear-cut. For genealogists tracing this period, this overlap matters: a great-grandfather listed as “Russian” in a London census of 1891 may have been born in Warsaw, Łódź or Białystok.
The interwar period and the road to 1939
Between the world wars the Polish population in London remained modest. The 1931 UK census counted 44,462 Polish-born residents nationally, of whom the overwhelming majority were Jewish; the figure for Polish-born Christians was around 4,500. Diplomatic relations between the reborn Polish Republic and the United Kingdom intensified after 1918, and the Polish Embassy was established at 47 Portland Place, a building purchased in 1921 that would soon take on far greater significance.
The Anglo-Polish Agreement of Mutual Assistance, signed on 25 August 1939, only six days before the German invasion, set the legal frame for everything that followed. When Germany attacked on 1 September 1939 and the Soviet Union invaded from the east on 17 September, the Polish state ceased to exist on its own territory but did not legally cease to exist at all. President Ignacy Mościcki, interned in Romania, transferred his office to Władysław Raczkiewicz on 30 September 1939. A government formed first in Paris, then in Angers, and in June 1940, after the fall of France, accepted Winston Churchill’s invitation to relocate to London.
London as the capital of free Poland, 1940–1990
From June 1940 the Polish government-in-exile operated from the Polish Embassy at 47 Portland Place in Marylebone. The president lived first at 56 Great Cumberland Place and later at 43 Eaton Place in Belgravia, the residence known to staff as “The Castle”. The government itself moved to Stratton House at 5 Stratton Street, while parts of the apparatus used the Polish Catholic Mission at 4 Devonia Road in Islington. The wartime government coordinated the Polish Underground State and the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), authorised the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 as part of Operation Tempest, and passed to the Allies some of the earliest credible reports of German atrocities, including the diplomatic note of 3 May 1941 that contained a three-page summary of conditions inside Auschwitz.
Around 20,000 Polish soldiers and airmen reached Britain by 1940, and thousands more followed. The Polish Air Force operated as an independent allied force under RAF operational control from August 1940; in the Battle of Britain, 145 Polish pilots shot down 203 enemy aircraft, with 303 Squadron the most effective unit in the campaign. The Polish War Memorial near RAF Northolt was unveiled in 1948 with the names of 1,243 Polish dead from the Second World War; a further 659 names were added in 2010.
After Yalta and Potsdam Britain transferred recognition to the Soviet-installed government in Warsaw in July 1945, but the London government refused to dissolve. It continued in unbroken legal succession until 22 December 1990, when President Ryszard Kaczorowski handed the presidential insignia and the original 1935 Constitution to the newly elected Lech Wałęsa at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. By the late Cold War years the apparatus was modest but real: a president, a cabinet of eight, meetings every two weeks in London, and the loyalty of around 150,000 Polish veterans and descendants in Britain, of whom roughly 35,000 lived in London itself.
The Polish Resettlement Act of 1947 and the postwar community
The Polish Resettlement Act 1947 was the first mass immigration legislation passed by the UK Parliament. It offered British citizenship and welfare provision to Polish servicemen who had fought under British command and who could not, or would not, return to a Soviet-controlled Poland. The figures debated in the Commons in February 1947 referred to roughly 213,000 Polish troops then in the United Kingdom. By the end of 1949 around 150,000 Polish soldiers and their dependants had settled permanently; later totals, including wives and children brought from displaced persons camps in Germany, Italy, India and East Africa, exceeded 249,000.
The mechanism was practical. The Polish Resettlement Corps, an unarmed transitional unit of the British Army, prepared men for civilian life. By October 1946 some 120,000 Polish troops were quartered in 265 camps across Britain, mostly former military bases with Nissen huts. The Committee for the Education of Poles, set up in 1947, ran Polish primary and secondary schools in England and Scotland and supported students at universities. London received a substantial share of the cohort, particularly Polish Air Force veterans and officers attached to the wartime command structure who had connections in the capital.
The 1951 census recorded 162,339 Polish-born residents in Britain, the historical peak before 2004. The number then declined steadily from 127,246 in 1961, 110,925 in 1971, 93,721 in 1981, 73,951 in 1991, and 60,711 in 2001 as the wartime generation aged. London neighbourhoods such as Earls Court, South Kensington, Hammersmith, Ealing, Acton and Balham developed visible Polish institutions: parishes, scout troops, Saturday schools and veterans’ associations.
POSK, the Polish Hearth Club and the institutional landscape
The two pillars of Polish institutional life in postwar London were the Polish Hearth Club (Ognisko Polskie) and the Polish Social and Cultural Centre (POSK). Ognisko was founded jointly by the British government and the Polish government-in-exile in 1939 at 55 Princes Gate in South Kensington, near the Brompton Oratory and Imperial College, and was formally inaugurated by Prince George, Duke of Kent, on 16 July 1940. It became the meeting place for Polish ministers, officers and intellectuals; General Władysław Anders kept his own table in the restaurant.
POSK was conceived in 1964 by Professor Roman Wajda (1901–1974), a Polish engineer who saw that the émigré community needed a single centralised home rather than scattered military and veterans’ clubs. Officially chartered on 23 July 1964, POSK was funded entirely by donations from the Polish community and Polish organisations. The site at 238–246 King Street in Hammersmith was acquired in 1972; the main brutalist building opened on 29 December 1974, with the theatre completed in 1982. The choice of Hammersmith reflected demographic reality: by the 1960s, west London held the largest concentration of Polish Londoners, around 32 per cent of the city’s Polish population.
POSK houses the Polish Library, founded in 1942, the Józef Piłsudski Institute, the Federation of Poles in Great Britain and the Polish University Abroad (PUNO), itself founded in Paris in 1939 and relocated to London during the war. Other institutions worth knowing for genealogical work include the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum on Princes Gate, the Polish Catholic Mission archives at Devonia Road, and the General Sikorski Historical Institute archive collections, which together hold service records, parish books, refugee files and personal papers from the entire postwar emigration.
After 1989 and the post-2004 wave
The fall of communism in 1989 reopened ordinary movement between Poland and the UK, but the change of scale came on 1 May 2004, when Poland joined the European Union and the United Kingdom alongside Ireland and Sweden — opened its labour market immediately to citizens of the new accession states. Polish nationals in the UK rose from around 69,000 in 2004 to roughly 853,000 in 2014 according to House of Commons Library figures, with the Office for National Statistics estimating 832,000 Polish-born residents by 2018, then the largest overseas-born group in the country.
London absorbed the largest single regional share. The 2014 figures recorded around 177,000 Polish-born residents in London, ahead of the South East with 123,000 and the North West with 97,000. Areas with established Polish institutions, Ealing, Hammersmith, Acton, Balham, gained new arrivals, but the post-2004 settlement also pushed into Hounslow, Haringey, Lewisham and the outer boroughs. Polish became the second most spoken language in England and Wales according to the 2011 census, and Polish delicatessens, parishes and Saturday schools multiplied across the city.
The post-2004 community differs in character from the postwar one. It is on average younger, more economically driven, more transnational in its ties with Poland, and less centred on the institutions built by the wartime exile. The two communities meet, but they do not always overlap. Brexit, voted for in June 2016 and completed in January 2020, introduced new uncertainty; the EU Settlement Scheme registered hundreds of thousands of Polish nationals in the UK but the long-term demographic trajectory now depends on family reunification, naturalisation and return migration to Poland.
Researching Polish ancestors who passed through London
For anyone tracing Polish family history through London, the city holds documents from every wave. Naturalisation records appear in the London Gazette — the issue of 18 October 1963, for example, lists dozens of Polish names with addresses, occupations and dates of certificate. The National Archives at Kew hold the Polish Resettlement registered files (PR and PLH series) under the Assistance Board and successor departments, with material on individual servicemen and dependants. The Sikorski Institute holds the records of the Polish armed forces in the West. The Polish Library at POSK holds the émigré press, parish bulletins and association papers. The Polish Catholic Mission archives at Devonia Road retain baptism, marriage and burial registers from London Polish parishes.
Genealogical research into Polish Londoners almost always reaches a point where the trail turns back to Poland to parish books in Mazovia, military records in Warsaw, civil registers in Małopolska. That is where on-the-ground research in Polish archives, with Polish-language and palaeographic skills, becomes essential. GenealogyTour.com has worked for over fifteen years connecting families with these archives and the towns and villages behind the records, combining professional research with personally guided heritage travel.
The Polish population in London is not a single migration but a sequence of overlapping ones, separated by generations and by reasons for leaving — religious refuge, failed uprisings, world war, communism, then the open European labour market. Each wave left material traces: a Soho street name, a wartime embassy, a Hammersmith cultural centre, a parish register, a Saturday school. For descendants of Polish Londoners, those traces are starting points. The records survive, the institutions still operate, and the family stories embedded in them are recoverable with the right archival work and, where it matters, a return to the places in Poland where the story originally began.
SOURCES:
- Poland Street area, Survey of London
- “London”, Trails of Hope. The Odyssey of Freedom, Institute of National Remembrance (IPN)
- “The role of the Polish government-in-exile”, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
- History of POSK, Polski Ośrodek Społeczno-Kulturalny
- The London Gazette, 18 October 1963, p. 8507
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