Warsaw Gasworks

The complex of buildings of the former gasworks in Wola is an example of industrial architecture characteristic of the late 19th century reflecting the history of the industrialisation and transformation of the district. It is one of the largest complexes of its kind in Europe.

In the first half of the 19th century, Powiśle was still Warsaw’s industrial district – it was here that a waterworks station and Warsaw’s first gasworks, among others, were established, only to be superseded in time by the Wola works. With the construction of the Warsaw–Vienna railway line in 1848, however, the industrial landscape of the capital was rapidly transformed. New factories were built close to the railway lines, shifting the burden of industrial development to Praga-Północ (Praga-North) and Wola, whose landscape quickly turned from small-town agricultural into industrial.

In the following two decades, these changes were fuelled by other factors: the abolition of the customs border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Russian Empire in 1851, and just over a decade later also the abolition of serfdom in the Kingdom and a wave of migration of the rural population to the cities, where former farmers found employment as workers. The social changes associated with industrialisation were also taking place within the privileged classes – at the turn of the century, as workshops, factories and industrial complexes rapidly grew in the urban landscape, so did the fortunes of their founders, who gained importance comparable to that of the landed gentry.

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City Gasworks in Warsaw – view from intersection of Dworska Street (currently Kasprzaka) & Bema Street. In foreground, roadside cross & substation, 1932, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl

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By the First World War, nearly 170 industrial plants had been set up in the Wola area, employing around 20,000 workers – roughly a third of all workers in local industry. In addition to the gasworks, it was home to the Lilpop, Rau and Loewenstein works specialising in machine building, which in the inter-war period were the largest industrial plants in Warsaw; the City Tramway Power Station; and plants producing armaments, chemical products or radios. Before the restoration of independence, Warsaw remained an important industrial centre of the Russian Empire, mainly due to metallurgical production.

The history of the city’s gas industry itself, on the other hand, begins in 1856, when, with the consent of the partitioning powers, the Warsaw magistrate concluded a contract with the Continental Gas Company of Dessau. It is no coincidence that this is a German company – suffice it to say that the first gasworks on the territory of present-day Poland before those in Warsaw were built in Wrocław, Szczecin, Gdańsk and Poznań. In the same year, the Continental Gas Company built its first gasworks on Ludna Street in Powiśle, and the day after Christmas the streets of Warsaw – from the gasworks on Ludna Street along Nowy Świat and Krakowskie Przedmieście to Castle Square (Plac Zamkowy) – were lit up with gas lanterns for the first time. Kurier Warszawski (Warsaw Currier) reported enthusiastically:

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Thousands of people strolled in crowds along the pavements, watching this […] undertaking, which crowned the current year, with such benefit for residents, with such decoration for the city. The beautiful, pure and silvery light spread such a strong glow all about that the clearest radiance spread above the streets where the lit gas beams ran as if from some kind of blaze.

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Gasworks complex, photo: Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

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It was street lighting that initially consumed virtually the entire supply of coal gas, known as ‘lighting’ gas, produced by the degassing of hard coal, i.e. its thermal decomposition at a temperature of around 1,000 degrees Celsius, without any air supply. Soon, however, gas also began to be used increasingly in homes and public buildings, including for heating water or space heating. Within three decades, the demand for the raw material in the city of more than 300,000 inhabitants had increased so much that it became necessary for the Prussian company to build another, much larger plant.

Construction of the Warsaw Gasworks, then known as the Gas Plant (Zakład Gazowy), began in 1886 at what was then Dworska Street (now Kasprzaka Street), on still empty land beyond the city’s tollgates. Connected by a five-kilometre-long gas pipeline to the plant on Ludna Street, the gasworks went into operation two years later. The complex initially consisted of a metering apparatus plant, a desulphurisation plant, a water tower, a boiler and furnace plant (now defunct) and a rotunda housing a metal gas tank, which was elevated over time. A chemical factory was built in 1892–93 to process gasworks by-products, above all gas tar into coke, and a second rotunda was added in the early years of the 20th century to cover the gas reservoir, and new boiler plants and staff housing were built.

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Interior of rotunda initially housing gas tank, 2009, photo: Wikipedia

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The brick complex is an example of the characteristic industrial architecture known as the round-arch style (Rundbogenstil) often used in railway stations of what was Prussia, i.e. dressed in a historicising though not strictly neo-style costume, freely drawing on elements of Romanesque, early Christian or Northern Italian Proto-Renaissance architecture. In the case of the Wola complex, links to Romanesque architecture remain clear, especially in the rotundas housing the gas tanks, and to Gothic architecture, e.g. in the divisions of the façade of the apparatus room. Evocations of old residential and defensive architecture not only suggest solidity and solemnity, but also, in their own way, fittingly reflected the social changes of the age of industrialisation – here the new, industrial aristocracy, as it were, manifested its position in the language of forms evoking the old architecture of power, filling it with new content. At the same time, the form itself was dictated by a desire to optimise construction time and costs. As pointed out by Michał Krasucki, art historian and the Capital City’s Conservator of Historical Monuments (Stołeczny Konserwator Zabytków), the buildings of the Warsaw gasworks, like many other industrial complexes of the period:

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[…] signalled the idea of rationalism in architecture, developed in the early 19th century by the French theoretician Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. According to these rationalist ideas, industrial architecture was to be fully adapted to its productive functions, was to maintain symmetry and axiality, was to use repeatable decorative motifs: its plan was to be based on duplicated modules.

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Installation by Danuta Karsten in Wola Rotundas, 2020, photo: Andrzej Hulimka

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The decoration here is also subordinated to economic rationality by being based on the brick detail of the unplastered façades, arcaded friezes, pilaster strips or stepped cornices.

Before World War I, the Wola plants, which used efficient vertical retort furnaces, were among the most modern in the world. After independence, there was a growing conflict between the city authorities and the German Continental Gas Company of Dessau. As a result, a receivership was put in place, and in 1925 the plants passed into the ownership of the state, which then handed them over to the city. Now known as the City Gasworks of the Capital City of Warsaw, the plants entered another phase of modernisation (completed in 1930) with the construction of, among other things, a benzol plant, an experimental station and a laboratory, distinguished by their modernist forms and plastered elevations but above all by a modern furnace plant in the Glover-West system, making continuous gas production possible while requiring less maintenance. It is thanks to this that the Wola plant was able to meet the demands of the entire city, and in December 1930 the already archaic – and troublesome for the inhabitants of the densely populated Powiśle – gasworks on Ludna Street was decommissioned.

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Old gasworks, Warsaw, 1949, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl

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The gasworks was bombed in September 1939 as part of the critical infrastructure of the capital city, but during the occupation it resumed operations. During the Warsaw Uprising, the gasworks became a place of refuge for local residents fleeing the slaughter of Wola. After the fighting ended, the Nazis stripped much of the complex of its equipment and mined the area. Restarting the gas supply to the ruined city was one of the priorities of the authorities after the war. The plant managed to start up as early as the end of June 1945, but it took five years before it could again operate at full capacity.

More efficient natural gas, however, gradually began to displace the older technology in the post-war decades, until the 1970s, when the tanks ceased to serve their previous function. The plant became primarily a transmission station, and some of the former technical buildings were converted into offices. Today, the gasworks site is owned by PGNiG S.A., and the former metering apparatus room houses the Gas Industry Museum, modernised in 2022. The exception, however, is the most characteristic element of the complex and of the Wola industrial landscape as such: the brick rotundas that once housed the gas tanks. These have remained in private hands since the beginning of the transformation period, and they remain deserted to this day despite the ideas for their development that emerged at the time – Andrzej Wajda, for example, proposed creating a Panorama of the Warsaw Uprising inside them, and adapting them to a residential function following the Viennese model was also considered.