Falling for Gdansk charm: A vibrant city of old and new

She visualised a bleak industrial metropolis, but was met by a vibrant cosmopolitan city of old and new, says Isabel Conway

The city stretches out in perfect symmetry along the charming water front of canals and river

Grainy black and white TV images of vast shipbuilding sheds, hulking steel cranes, factory chimneys belching out smoke, workers on sit-in strikes, demanding improved wages, and the lowering of astronomical food prices. That was my first glimpse of a faraway, repressed, eastern European city called Gdansk back in the mists of time.

Those of a certain age will remember the Solidarity movement, led by a charismatic shipyards electrician Lech Walesa. It was a monumental struggle in which murders, torture and repression by the Communist regime lasted almost two decades, until the birth of a free Poland in 1989.