Qualla: Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jake from Manchester, UK, CC BY 2.0. In 2006, a passer-by in Brixton stopped at a skip and reached in. What he pulled out were two thousand photographs taken by a man named Jan Markiewicz, documenting the early Polish community of 1950s South London. Someone had thrown away an archive of an entire diaspora. The photographs ended up at 20 Prince's Gate, a Grade II listed terrace facing Hyde Park, where they joined the regimental colours, the manuscripts of Adam Mickiewicz, the 17th-century hussar helmet, and the bronze bust of Wojtek the soldier bear. This is the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, and it exists because, in 1945, going home was not an option.

Image: Jake from Manchester, UK | CC BY 2.0

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum: May 1945, and Nowhere to Return

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jake from Manchester, UK, CC BY 2.0. The institute was founded on 2 May 1945, almost the moment the war in Europe ended. The timing matters. For Polish soldiers, airmen, sailors, and civilians scattered across the United Kingdom, victory came without homecoming. Under the Yalta Accords, one third of Poland's prewar ...

Image: Jake from Manchester, UK | CC BY 2.0

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum: Named for a General Who Did Not Survive the War

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jake from Manchester, UK, CC BY 2.0. Władysław Sikorski was Poland's prime minister-in-exile and commander-in-chief of its armed forces in the West. He died in 1943 in a plane crash off Gibraltar, leaving the diaspora without its most prominent leader. Naming the institute after him was both tribute and statement: t...

Image: Jake from Manchester, UK | CC BY 2.0

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum: The Underground Made Visible

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. In 1948, veterans led by General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski - the man who had commanded the Warsaw Uprising - founded the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, the Studium. For forty years it operated separately, gathering documents about the Polish Underground State, the largest ...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum: Across the Road from Empire

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit yellow book, CC BY 2.0. The building itself has a quiet irony. The Victorian terrace was built by Charles James Freake, the same developer who built the nearby Polish Hearth Club. Kensington Road faces Hyde Park - parade ground of empire, where coronations and jubilees have rolled past for two centuries...

Image: yellow book | CC BY 2.0

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum: Wojtek and the Things People Carried

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jake from Manchester, UK, CC BY 2.0. Among the most visited exhibits is a bronze sculpture by David Harding of Wojtek - the Syrian brown bear adopted as a cub by Polish soldiers in Iran in 1942, who travelled with the 22nd Artillery Supply Company through Iraq, Egypt, and Italy, who carried artillery shells at Monte...

Image: Jake from Manchester, UK | CC BY 2.0