With its high-tempo use of Multicultural London English and blend of drum’n’bass and acoustic guitar, the song Five by Bedford-based rapper Pat is instantly recognisable as a product of the UK’s contemporary rap scene. Yet even the most fast-mouthed stars of British grime would probably struggle to integrate the word niezapowiedzianych (“unannounced”) into their rhyme schemes.
Born in Silesia, western Poland, Patryk “Pat” Wojcik moved with his family to England in 2007, three years after Poland joined the European Union. He learned to speak English by listening to British rappers such as Jme and Devlin, and makes music that pays homage to his native country and his adopted home, with lyrics such as “I chase cash like I’m Mateusz Gotówka” – a nod to the Anglo-Polish Aston Villa footballer also known as Matty Cash.
Five, which describes the melancholy feeling of disorientation brought by working night shifts, has become – in Pat’s words – “the anthem of Polish immigrants”. Its chorus sums up the feelings of a sizeable yet frequently overlooked community that remains strongly tied to the British isles even after Brexit: “It don’t make sense if I stay here, but everywhere I move just doesn’t feel like home.”
Consisting of nearly 700,000 people, the United Kingdom’s Polish community is one of the country’s largest minorities, and its history stretches back way beyond the moment when Poles were able to enjoy freedom of movement 20 years ago. Yet in portrayals of British culture and arts, it is effectively absent, says Juliette Bretan, a PhD candidate studying representations of Poland at Cambridge. “Where are the Poles on British television? They’re the largest [linguistic] minority in the UK, but we never see any.”
Part of the reason, Bretan argues, is that Britain’s Polish diaspora is itself divided – by class, religion and history. They mostly arrived in three waves: officers and aristocrats in west London during the second world war, middle-class dissidents escaping communism in the 1970s and 80s, and the primarily working-class migrants who came after Poland joined the EU in 2004.
The very essence of its “Polishness” can be hard to pin down, encompassing Catholics, Jews and even a small number of Muslim Tatars, not just from within Poland’s modern borders but also what is now Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania.
Another reason why the cultural life of Poles in the UK has remained relatively invisible is that many have been quick to blend into British life – out of enthusiasm for the culture of their adopted home, fear of discrimination or both.
“For me the intellectual and cultural aspect of Britain was interesting,” says Wojtek van Portek, global lead stylist for English fashion brand Reiss, who moved to London as a young adult. Enthusiastic in his praise of both London’s dynamism and Margaret Thatcher’s anti-communism, he said he also had “some experiences where I was treated badly, saying my name is too different or saying openly they’re sick of my thick accent.”
“The pressure to not be Polish was a weird one”, says rapper Pat. “As soon as I started learning the language, I tried to be as English as I possibly could.”
The pain of Britain’s vote to leave the EU, and the role that Polish migrants played in the referendum campaign, was thus especially acute. Shortly after the Brexit vote, the doors of the Polish Social and Cultural Association in Hammersmith – one of the west London venues that has been a hub of Polish expat life for decades – were scrawled with xenophobic graffiti. In the years that followed, almost a quarter of Britain’s Polish community left the country.
Those who stayed, however, are making a noticeable effort to show their culture in a more positive light. Last month’s Polish Heritage Days, an annual month-long festival showcasing the cultural life of Britain’s Polish community set up in 2017, saw 95 local organisations take part.
A screening of the Oscar-nominated digi-painted adaptation of classic Polish novel The Peasants, by Anglo-Polish director couple DK and Hugh Welchman, sold out the BFI’s Imax on the closing night of the Kinoteka Polish film festival in February.
“Brexit had the concomitant effect of making Polish culture more visible,” Bretan says.
Paradoxically, Brexit’s highlighting of the UK’s Polish community has also made people with more distant Polish ancestry get in touch with it. At Ognisko Polskie club and restaurant in South Kensington in London, a venue founded in 1939 to support Polish government officers in exile, Bretan says she has recently seen “a lot of new faces, people with more distant Polish heritage who were perhaps interacting with the culture for the first time”.
Ren Behan, a British baker and chef of Polish descent, says she has found an unexpectedly enthusiastic audience for her book The Sweet Polish Kitchen. “I’ve been really surprised by how many people have a Polish connection,” she says. “What’s been nice is to connect to people who then say ‘I’m a bit Polish too.’”
“Language does put some people off initially,” she admits, “but it’s nice to try and popularise it.” The increasing popularity of Poland as a holiday destination means that words such as pączki (doughnuts) have started to become more recognisable.
It’s not just sweet Szarlotka apple pie that connects people to their Polish side. For London-born writer Gabriel Krauze, whose semi-biographical debut novel Who They Was told the story of growing up around London gang culture, Polish literature has “an acceptance of narratives that have darkness”, while in the UK “there is an obsession with redemptive narrative arcs”.
“The output of eastern European cinema that has a certain darkness to it, and a romanticism of despair inspires me, especially with Poland being invaded so many times,” he says, pointing to the works of film-makers Krzysztof Kieślowski, Andrzej Żuławski, Andrzej Wajda as well as Joseph Conrad, the Heart of Darkness author, whom he describes as “one of the greatest authors of English literature”.
Despite his dissident parents’ expectations, Krauze didn’t connect with his Polish heritage growing up, not learning to speak the tricky language that he says has “words like wifi passwords” fluently. But things are changing. One chapter in Who They Was describes the Slavic tradition of bashing together ornately painted eggs on Easter Sunday, a custom Krauze says he would want to keep up if he has a family.
“Traditions are anchors, they anchor us to our roots, even once we are far away from them.”