title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: At the end of the 19th-century London, along with Zurich and Vienna, had become one of the centres of Polish political activism, especially of the left. Józef Piłsudski stayed in Leytonstone after his escape from St-Petersburg. The political review, "Przedświt" ("Pre-Dawn") was published in Whitechapel for several years, notably under the editorship of Leon Wasilewski 1898–1903, later to become the first foreign minister of a newly independent Poland in 1918.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Both before and after the First World War, a few Poles settled in Londonfollowing the Russian Revolution of 1905 and then in the war, those released from London's prisoner-of-war camps for Germans and Austrians in the Alexandra Palace and at Feltham. In 1910 a sixteen-year old youth from Warsaw settled in London for the sake of his art: he was to be a future ballet master, Stanislas Idzikowski. Polish people living in the Austrian and German partitions had been obliged to serve in their respective national forces and were unable to return.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The resurgence of an independent Poland in 1918, briefly complicated by the Polish–Soviet War from 1918 to 1920, enabled the country to rapidly reorganise its polity, develop its economy, and resume its place in international forums. One of the Polish delegates at the Paris Peace Conference, was a London-based émigré, Count Leon Ostroróg. This two-decade period of advance was disrupted in September 1939 by a coordinated German and Soviet invasion that marked the beginning of World War II.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: It was the Polish contribution to the Allied war effort in the United Kingdom that led to the establishment of the postwar Polish community in Britain. During the Second World War, most of the Poles arrived as military or political émigrés as a result of the combined German-Soviet occupation of Poland.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: As the invasion of Poland progressed throughout September 1939, the Polish government evacuated into Romania and from there to France. Based at first in Paris, it moved to Angers until June 1940, when France capitulated to the Germans. With the Fall of France, the Polish Government-in-Exile relocated to London, along with a first wave of at least 20,000 soldiers and airmen in 1940. It was recognized by all the Allied governments. Politically, it was a coalition of the Polish Peasant Party, the Polish Socialist Party, the Labour Party, and the National Party. Although these parties maintained only a vestigial existence in the circumstances of the war, the tasks of the Government-in-Exile were immense, requiring open lines of communication with, and control of, the Polish Underground State "in situ" and the Polish Underground Army in occupied Poland, and the maintenance of international diplomatic relations for the organization of regular Polish military forces in Allied states.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: On 4 July 1943 the Polish Prime Minister-in-Exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who was also Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, died in an air crash off Gibraltar as he was returning to Britain from an inspection tour of Polish forces in the Mediterranean theatre. Until the Germans' April 1943 discovery of mass graves of 28,000 executed Polish military reserve officers at Katyn, near Smolensk in Russia, Sikorski had wished to work with the Soviets. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviets' importance to the Western alliance had grown while British support for Polish aspirations had begun to decline. As the war progressed, Polish plans to more completely incorporate Poland's underground Home Army into the broader strategy of the Western allies—including contingency plans to move Polish Air Force fighter squadrons, and the Polish Parachute Brigade, to Poland—foundered on British and American reluctance to antagonise a vital Soviet ally hostile to Polish autonomy; on the distance from British-controlled bases to occupied Poland, which lay at the extreme flying range of available aircraft; and on the frittering away of the Polish Parachute Brigade on a patently flawed British operation at Arnhem, the Netherlands.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: One of the most important Polish contributions to Allied victory had actually begun in late 1932, nearly seven years before the outbreak of war when the mathematician-cryptologist Marian Rejewski, with limited aid from French military intelligence, constructed a double of the sight-unseen German Enigma cipher machine used by the German civil and military authorities. Five weeks before the outbreak of war, in late July 1939, Rejewski and his fellow cryptologists, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki had disclosed to French and British intelligence in Warsaw the techniques and technologies they had developed for "breaking" German Enigma ciphers. Poland's "Biuro Szyfrów" (Cipher Bureau, operated by the Polish General Staff) gave the British and French an Enigma double, each. This enabled the British, who had been unable to break German Enigma ciphers at Bletchley Park, to develop their "Ultra" operation. At war's end, General Dwight Eisenhower characterized Ultra as having been "decisive" to Allied victory. Former Bletchley Park cryptologist Gordon Welchman wrote: "Ultra would never have got off the ground if we had not learned from the Polish, in the nick of time, details both of the German military... the Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use [by the Germans]."


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The first Polish military branch to transfer substantial personnel and equipment to the United Kingdom was the Polish Navy. Shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, the Polish government ordered three destroyers, for their protection and in anticipation of joint operations with the Royal Navy, to sail for Great Britain (Operation Peking). Two submarines also sailed there, the "Orzeł" (Eagle) arriving unannounced in Scotland after a daring breakout from the Baltic Sea following its illegal internment in Estonia.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Polish Navy personnel to come under Royal Navy command comprised 1,400 officers and 4,750 sailors. By chance, Poland's only two ocean-going commercial liners, MS "Piłsudski" and MS "Batory" were also on the high seas on 1 September 1939 and were both shortly thereafter requisitioned by the British Admiralty for war service. The former was lost in November 1939 when it struck a mine off the Yorkshire coast. "Batory", dubbed ""the Lucky ship"", became a troop and civilian carrier and hospital ship. It effected a major evacuation during the Battle of Narvik and completed hundreds of convoys on the Mediterranean Sea and on the Atlantic, before being surrendered to the control of the communist authorities in Warsaw in 1946.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: In May 1941, the Polish destroyer "Piorun"—Thunderbolt—was able to locate and engage the world's most powerful battleship, "Bismarck", drawing its fire for an hour while the Royal Navy caught up in time to destroy the German warship.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The Poles formed the fourth-largest Allied armed force after the Soviets, the Americans, and the combined troops of the British Empire. They were the largest group of non-British personnel in the RAF during the Battle of Britain, and the 303 Polish Squadron was the most successful RAF unit in the Battle of Britain. Special Operations Executive had a large section of covert, elite Polish troops who cooperated closely with the Polish underground army.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: By July 1945 there were 228,000 troops of the Polish Armed Forces in the West serving under the British. Many of these men and women came from the "Kresy" region (eastern Poland), including from the major cities of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) and Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania). They had been deported by the Soviets from the "Kresy" to the gulags when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union occupied Poland in 1939 under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Two years later, when Churchill and Joseph Stalin formed an alliance against Adolf Hitler, the mostly ""Kresy" Poles" were released from the Gulags in Siberia to form "Anders' Army" and were made to walk via Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, where thousands perished on the way, to Iran. There the Polish II Corps came into being under British command. They fought in the battles of Monte Cassino, the Falaise Gap, Arnhem, Tobruk, and in the liberation of many European cities, including Bologna and Breda.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The Polish troops who contributed to the Allied defeat of the Germans in North Africa and Italy, had expected to be able to return at war's end to their "Kresy" (eastern Polish) homeland in an independent and democratic Poland. But at Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill acquiesced in Stalin's Soviet Union annexation of the "Kresy" lands (roughly half of pre-war Poland's landmass), in accordance with the provisions of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. This entailed massive postwar Polish population deportations to western so-called "Recovered Territories" assigned from Germany to Poland. The great majority of Polish soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the West would never return to their homeland. In apparent reaction to British acquiescence in Poland's postwar future, thirty officers and men of the Polish II Corps committed suicide.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Churchill explained the government's actions in a three-day Parliamentary debate, begun on 27 February 1945, which ended in a vote of confidence. Many MPs openly criticised Churchill over Yalta and voiced strong loyalty to the UK's Polish allies. Churchill may not have been confident that Poland would be the independent and democratic country to which Polish troops could return; he said: "His Majesty's Government will never forget the debt they owe to the Polish troops... I earnestly hope it will be possible for them to have citizenship and freedom of the British Empire, if they so desire."


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: During the debate, 25 MPs and Peers risked their future political careers to draft an amendment protesting against the UK's acceptance of a geographically reconfigured Poland's integration into the Soviet sphere of influence, thereby shifting it westwards into the heart of Europe. These members included Arthur Greenwood, Sir Archibald Southby, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, and Victor Raikes. After the amendment was defeated, Henry Strauss, MP for Norwich, resigned his seat in protest at the British government's abandonment of Poland.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London are the repository for archival material relating to this period.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: During their 1942 evacuation from the Soviet Union to the Near East, soldiers of the Polish Second Corps had, at an Iranian railroad station, purchased a Syrian brown bear cub. He travelled with them on the Polish troop-transport ship "Kościuszko" and subsequently accompanied them to Egypt and to the Italian campaign. In Italy he helped shift ammunition crates and became a celebrity with visiting Allied generals and statesmen.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: In order to bring him to Italy, as regimental mascots and pets were not allowed onboard transport ships, the bear was formally enrolled as Private Wojciech Perski (his surname being the Polish adjective meaning "Persian"; Wojtek is the diminutive for "Wojciech").


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: After the war, mustered out of the Polish Army, Wojtek was billeted, and lived out his retirement, at the Edinburgh Zoo, where he was visited by fellow exiles and former Polish comrades-in-arms and won the affection of the public. Posthumously he has inspired books, films, plaques, and statues in the UK and Poland.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, many thousands of Polish servicemen and women made their way via Hungary and Romania (which then had common borders with Poland) to France, where they again fought against the invading Germans; and in 1942 the newly formed Polish Second Corps evacuated from the Soviet Union, via Iran, to the Near East, subsequently fighting in campaigns there and in North Africa, Italy, and northwest Europe. Some Second Corps personnel transferred from the Near East into Polish Armed Services units in the UK.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: At war's end, many of the Poles were transported to, and stayed in, camps in the United Kingdom. In order to ease their transition from a Polish-British military environment to British civilian life, a satisfactory means of demobilisation was sought by British authorities. This took the form of a Polish Resettlement Corps (PRC), as an integral corps of the British Army, into which the Poles who wished to stay in the UK could enlist for the transitional period of their demobilisation.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The PRC was formed in 1946 (Army Order 96 of 1946) and was disbanded after fulfilling its purpose in 1949 (Army Order 2 of 1950).


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: When the Second World War ended, a communist government was installed in Poland. Most Poles felt betrayed by their wartime allies and declined to "return to Poland" either because their homeland had become a hostile foreign state or because of Soviet repressions of Poles, Soviet conduct during the Warsaw uprising of 1944, the trial of the Sixteen, and executions of former members of the Home Army. To accommodate Poles unable to return to their home country, Britain enacted the Polish Resettlement Act of 1947, Britain's first mass immigration law. Initially, a very large Polish community was centred around Swindon, where many military personnel had been stationed during the war.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: After occupying Polish Resettlement Corps camps, many Poles settled in London and other conurbations, many of them recruited as European Volunteer Workers. Many others settled in the British Empire, forming large Polish Canadian and Polish Australian communities, or in the United States and Argentina.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: In the 1951 UK Census, some 162,339 residents had listed Poland as their birthplace, up from 44,642 in 1931. Polish arrivals to the UK included survivors of German concentration and POW camps and war wounded needing additional help adapting to civilian life. This help was provided by a range of charitable endeavours, some coordinated by Sue Ryder (1924–2000), a British humanitarian who, as Baroness Ryder of Warsaw, was later raised to the House of Lords and spoke there in the cause of Poland.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Another British woman, Dame Cicely Saunders, was inspired by three displaced Polish men to revolutionise palliative care and care of the dying. She met the first two, David Tasma—who had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto—and Antoni Michniewicz, as they were dying. The third Pole, , a painter and art critic, supported her work and became her husband in old age. Saunders is considered the founder of the hospice movement.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Britain's Polish immigrants tended to settle in areas near Polish churches and food outlets. In West London, they settled in Earl's Court, known in the 1950s as the "Polish Corridor", in reference to the interwar Central European political entity and, as house prices rose, they moved to Hammersmith, then Ealing, and in South London, to Lewisham and Balham. As these communities grew, even if many Poles had integrated with local British educational and religious institutions, the Polish Catholic Mission in England and Wales, in agreement with the English and Scottish hierarchies, considered that Polish priests should minister to Polish parishioners. The original Polish church in London in Devonia Road, Islington was bought in 1928 with much delay, following the First World War. However canonically, subsequent Polish "parishes" are actually branches of the Polish Catholic Mission and not parishes in the conventional sense and are accountable to the episcopate in Poland, through a vicar delegate, although each is located in a British Catholic diocese, to whom it owes the courtesy of being connected. The first post-war Polish "parish" in London was attached to Brompton Oratory in South Kensington, followed by a chapel in Willesden staffed by Polish Jesuits. Brockley-Lewisham was founded in 1951, followed by Clapham, while St Andrew Bobola church in Shepherd's Bush (1962) was regarded as the "Polish garrison" church. Among its many commemorative plaques is one to a clairvoyant and healer housewife and Soviet deportee, Waleria Sikorzyna: she had had a detailed premonitory dream two years before the 1939 invasion of Poland, but was politely dismissed by the Polish military authorities. Currently the Polish Catholic Mission operates around 219 parishes and pastoral centres with 114 priests throughout England and Wales. In 2007 Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, primate of England, expressed concern "that Poles are creating a separate Church in Britain", but Polish rector, Mgr Kukla, responded that the Polish Catholic Mission continued to have a "good relationship" with the hierarchy in England and Wales and said that integration was a long process.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The social make-up of successive waves of Polish migration to the UK is comparable to 19th- and early-20th-century Polish migrations to France. In both cases, the original mainly political migrants were drawn largely from elite and educated strata and reflected the heterogeneity of their class, and they quickly established cultural institutions such as libraries and learned societies. They included representatives of past Polish minorities such as Jews, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, Ruthenians, and people of Muslim Tatar descent. In both cases, they were followed by waves of more socially-homogeneous economic migrants.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Since the Second World War, Poland has lost much of its earlier ethnic diversity, with the exception of Polska Roma, a distinct ethnolinguistic group and other Polish Roma communities, and this has been reflected in recent Polish migrations to the UK. A recent study of comparative literature by Mieczysŀaw Dąbrowski, of Warsaw University, appears to bear this out.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: A key military and latterly, news and cultural role was played by broadcasts in Polish, beamed to Poland, from London by the BBC's Polish section. They began on 7 September 1939 with coded messages among prosaic material for the Polish Underground and after expansion into English by radio ended on 23 December 2005, a victim of budgetary cuts and new priorities.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Across the mainland UK, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the original Polish communities chiefly comprised former members of the Polish Resettlement Corps. They set up Polish clubs, cultural centres, and adult and youth organisations, e.g., the Polish Youth Group ("KSMP"). They contributed to, and in turn were supported by, veterans' welfare charities such as veterans' "SPK" (Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantów), airmen's and naval clubs. These organisations' original aims were to provide venues for socialising and exposure to Polish culture and heritage for children of former Polish Resettlement Corps members. Many of these groups remain active, and steps are being taken to cater to more recent Polish migrants.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The post-war phase saw a continuation of Polish intellectual and political life in microcosm in the UK, with the publication of newspapers and journals such as "Dziennik Polski" and "Wiadomości", the establishment of independent (of the Polish "regime") publishing houses such as "Veritas" and "Odnowa", with a worldwide reach, and professional theatrical productions under the auspices of a dramatic society, "Syrena". "Orbis Books (London)" was a bookseller, publishing house and for a time a record producer (under the label Polonia UK), founded in Edinburgh in 1944 by Kapt. Józef Olechnowicz, brought to New Oxford Street, London in 1946 and eventually bought by Jerzy Kulczycki in 1972. Poles in London played their part in the blossoming of modern art movements during the Swinging Sixties. Chief among them were two gallery owners, the painter, Halima Nałęcz, at the "Drian Gallery" in Bayswater and the pharmacist and philanthropist, Mateusz Grabowski with his "Grabowski Gallery" in Sloane Avenue, Chelsea, London. Grabowski promoted Polish and other diaspora artists, such as Pauline Boty, Frank Bowling, Józef Czapski, Stanisław Frenkiel, Bridget Riley and Aubrey Williams.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Concern for the maintenance of Polish language and culture in the UK was entrusted to the "Polska Macierz Szkolna" – Polish Educational Society, a voluntary organization that operated a network of Saturday schools. Parishes also organized an active Polish scout movement (ZHP pgk). Polish religious orders founded boarding schools in England. In 1947 The Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth started a school for girls, The Holy Family of Nazareth Convent School in Pitsford near Northampton. Displaced members of the Polish Marian Fathers opened a first school for boys in Herefordshire. Then with financial help from the Polish diaspora, they acquired a vacant historic property on the river Thames outside Henley-on-Thames which became "Divine Mercy College" and a heritage museum at Fawley Court, a Grade I listed building, which functioned as a college from 1953 to 1986 and as a museum and retreat and conference centre until about 2010, when it was sold off by the Polish order amid controversy. In the grounds of the property is a church building and Columbarium (1071) commissioned by Prince Radziwill in memory of his mother, Anna Lubomirska. The prince was himself laid to rest there in 1976. It is Grade II listed by English Heritage.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: As a result of the 1939 invasion of Poland, the entirety of Polish universities and academic research fell into disarray. Although very reduced tertiary teaching continued underground, many academics perished in Katyn and in Concentration camps or shared the fate of the civilian population. Those who were abroad at the outbreak of war or who managed to escape set about salvaging their heritage outside Poland. During the war several British universities hosted Polish academic departments to enable Polish students to complete their interrupted studies: thus Liverpool offered veterinary science in Polish and Oxford hosted a Polish faculty of law, and Edinburgh had a Polish Medical Faculty, whose alumni fortuitously joined the roll out of the National Health Service in the UK. These arrangements came to an end in the late 1940s and to cater for many demobilized service personnel wishing to resume their studies or research, "PUNO" (Polski Uniwersytet na Obczyznie) – The Polish University Abroad was founded in 1949, offering humanities subjects in Polish. It exists to this day with a London base at the Polish Social and Cultural Centre in Hammersmith and has opened departments in other European countries.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: During the Cold War, Poles assembled twice in the UK to mark historic national events. The first was in 1966 the Millennium of Poland's baptism as a Christian nation, when among other festivities, a Mass was celebrated in London's White City Stadium, filled to its 45,000 capacity. The second gathering was during the visit by the Polish pontiff, Pope John Paul II, to the United Kingdom in 1982. While the Pope visited nine British cities and was welcomed by two million British Roman Catholics and others, a Mass specifically for 20,000 Polish faithful was held at the Crystal Palace stadium in London on Sunday 30 May.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: In December 1990, when Lech Wałęsa became the first non-Communist president of Poland since the war, the ceremonial insignia of the Polish Republic, including the original text of the Polish 1935 constitution were handed over to him in Warsaw by the last "President" of the London-based government-in-exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski. This act symbolized the legitimate transfer of independent Poland's seals of office and put an end to the political opposition that, for half a century, had both dogged and been the bedrock of the Polish diaspora in the United Kingdom. Arguably a majority of Polish people had fought hard to combat communism, and for their right to democratic liberties. While an increasingly frail and diminishing group upheld the existence of the "Zamek" – "Citadel" shorthand for the Polish National Council as the "virtual opposition" to the communist regime in Poland it held little sway with the Polish diaspora in the UK. Instead, London came to be seen as an important centre for fostering business and cultural relations with contemporary Poland.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: For the duration of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, Poles in the UK were engaged in a massive effort of helping economically their relatives and friends in Poland. Initially they sent food parcels and medicines as Poland recovered from the ravages of war then the assistance changed to money transfers, sometimes from their own meagre pensions, in the belief that they were still better off living in freedom. "Tazab" and "Haskoba" were the earliest UK-based parcel operations, while Grabowski was a mail order pharmacy. When Poland raised import tariffs, they turned their focus in the mid 1950s to travel, like "Fregata Travel", the latter being a brand that had migrated to London from pre-war Lwow. With banking agreements with Poland in place, the travel companies acted as transfer bureaux via the Polish bank PKO.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The relaxation of travel restrictions to and from Poland after October 1956 saw a steady increase in Polish exchanges with the United Kingdom in the 1950s. In the 1960s a purge of communist party members and intellectuals of Jewish descent led to a further influx of Poles into the UK. Only with the accession of Edward Gierek in 1970 as First Secretary of the Polish Workers' Party (PZPR), who himself had spent time as a migrant in France and Belgium, did it become possible for Poles to leave their country with relative ease.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The "Polish Trustee Association", founded by the Ex-Combatants (SPK), handled legacies left by Polish DPs for their kin in Poland.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Polish servicemen who died in the Battle of Britain or subsequently, found their final resting places mainly in six cemeteries across the United Kingdom: Newark-on-Trent, Blackpool, Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, Yatesbury in Wiltshire, Grangemouth in Scotland, and Wrexham in Wales. Then, as the first generation of émigrés settled in various urban areas, often clustered around Polish clubs and churches, their graves and memorials began to appear in nearby existing cemeteries. Thus in London and its environs there were Polish burials especially in Brompton (Central London), Gunnersbury, Mortlake, Norwood and Putney Vale cemeteries.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The Polish War Memorial, in a prominent position close to RAF Northolt West of London, commemorating the Polish airmen who fought for Great Britain, was erected in two stages. It was initially unveiled in 1948 with the names of 1,243 flyers. In time, a further 659 names were identified and were added during a refurbishment of the monument carried out in 1994-6 funded by a public appeal. It was ceremonially re-opened. In 2015 a memorial garden was added to mark the 75th anniversary of the battle. The monument is Grade II listed by English Heritage.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Franciszek Kornicki (1916–2017) is the last Polish fighter pilot to die. His funeral was held in November 2017.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: By contrast, the wish of the British Polish community to honour its 28,000 fellow countrymen, many of them close relatives, who fell victim of the Katyn massacre with a memorial met with sustained obstruction from the British authorities. This, it appears, was owing to the effective diplomatic pressure exerted by the Soviet Union on Anglo-Soviet relations at the height of the Cold War. Despite public funds having been raised, the project was delayed for many years. A measure of "détente" in East-West relations in the mid 1970s, allowed a monument to be installed inside Gunnersbury Cemetery. There was no official British attendance at the unveiling in September 1976. Those British officials who came, did so in their private capacity.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: There are now over a dozen Polish war memorials across the UK, including in the RAF church, St Clement Danes in the City of London and St Andrew Bobola Church, Hammersmith.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: During the twentieth century, world events meant that in Europe, London eclipsed Paris as the traditional destination of choice for Polish dissidents. The establishment of Polish communities across the UK after the Second World War along with supporting institutions cemented links between the UK-Polish community and relatives and friends in Poland. This encouraged a steady flow of migrants from Poland to the UK, which accelerated after the fall of Communism in 1989. Throughout the 1990s, Poles used the eased travel restrictions to move to the UK and work, sometimes in the grey economy.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Poland joined the EU on 1 May 2004 and Poles, as EU citizens, gained the right to freedom of movement and establishment across the European Union. Most member states, though, had negotiated temporary restrictions to their labour markets, up to a maximum of seven years, for citizens from new member states. To the contrary, the UK (as Sweden too) granted immediate full access to its labour market to citizens from the new member states. over entrants from these accession states,


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Seven-year temporary restrictions on benefits that EU citizens including Poles could claim, covered by the Worker Registration Scheme, ended in 2011.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The Home Office publishes quarterly statistics on applications to the Worker Registration Scheme. Figures published in August 2007 indicated that some 656,395 persons were accepted on to the scheme between 1 May 2004 and 30 June 2007, of whom 430,395 were Polish nationals. However, as the scheme is voluntary, offers no financial incentive and is not enforced; immigrants are free to choose whether or not to participate. They may work legally in the UK provided they have a Polish identity card or passport and a UK National Insurance number. This has led to some estimates of Polish nationals in the UK being much higher. Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) publishes quarterly reports containing data on National Insurance number (NINo) allocations to adult overseas nationals entering the UK. The number of Polish nationals’ NINo registrations peaked between 2006 and 2008. In the financial year 2006/07 there were 220,430 Polish nationals receiving NINo registration (31% of all NINo registrations to adult overseas nationals entering the UK) and in 2007/2008- 210,660 (29% of all registrations to adult overseas nationals). The number of NINo registrations granted to Polish citizens has been in significant decline since 2016 referendum. In the year to June 2016 Polish born adults received 105 thousand NINo's, 18% less than in the year before a 13% share of all NINo registrations to adult overseas nationals entering the UK. The latest statistical data covering the year to the end of March 2020 shows a further decrease in Polish NINo registrations. During this period 38 thousand Polish citizens received NINos - 13% less than in the previous year and a significantly smaller share of all adult overseas registrations compared with previous years - 5%.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The Polish magazine "Polityka" launched a 'Stay With Us' scheme offering young academics a £5,000 bonus to encourage them to live and work at home in Poland. Additionally on 20 October 2007, a campaign was launched by the British Polish Chamber of Commerce called "Wracaj do Polski" ('Come Back to Poland') which encouraged Poles living and working in the UK to return home.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: By the end of 2007, stronger economic growth in Poland than in the UK, falling unemployment and the rising strength of the Polish złoty had reduced the economic incentive for Poles to migrate to the UK. Poland was one of the few countries to not be badly affected by the 2008 economic downturn. Labour shortages in Polish cities and in sectors such as construction, IT and financial services have also played a part in stemming the flow of Poles to the UK. According to the August 2007 Accession Monitoring Report, fewer Poles migrated in the first half of 2007 than in the same period in 2006.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The 2001 UK Census recorded 60,711 Polish-born UK residents; 60,680 of these resided in Great Britain (not including Northern Ireland), compared to 73,951 in 1991. Following immigration after Poland's accession to the EU, the Office for National Statistics estimated 832,000 Polish-born residents in the UK in 2018, making Poles the largest overseas-born group, having outgrown the Indian-born population. The 2011 UK Census recorded 579,121 Polish-born residing in England, 18,023 in Wales, 55,231 in Scotland, and 19,658 in Northern Ireland.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The Office for National Statistics estimates that the Polish-born population of the UK was 691,000 in 2020.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: According to the 2011 UK Census in England and Wales, there are 0.5 million residents whose main language is Polish; which amounts to 1% of the whole population aged three years and over. In London, there were 147,816 Polish speakers. The main concentration of Polish people in London is in Ealing, in West London (21,507; 6.4% of all usual residents). Elsewhere in the capital, the biggest Polish communities are in the outer Boroughs of: Haringey, Brent, Hounslow, Waltham Forest, Barnet. Outside London, the largest Polish communities are in: Birmingham, Southampton, Slough (8,341; 5.9%), Luton, Leeds, Peterborough, Nottingham, Manchester, Leicester, Coventry and the Borough of Boston in Lincolnshire (2.975; 4.6%).


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Scotland has seen a significant influx of Polish immigrants. Estimates of the number of Poles living in Scotland in 2007 ranged from 40,000 (General Register Office for Scotland) to 50,000 (the Polish Council). The 2011 UK Census recorded 11,651 people in Edinburgh born in Poland, which is 2.4% of the city's population – a higher proportion than anywhere else in Scotland apart from Aberdeen, where 2.7% were born in Poland.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: In Northern Ireland, the number of people reporting in the 2011 census that they were born in Poland was 19,658, and the number stating that they spoke Polish as a first language was 17,700. Despite a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) recruitment drive in November 2006 that attracted 968 applications from Poles, with language exams being held both in Northern Ireland and in Warsaw, , none had entered the PSNI's ranks. The first Polish national to join the PSNI started working in August 2010.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: In London and various other major cities, Poles are employed across virtually all sectors from care work, construction, hospitality sector to education, NHS, banking and financial services. There is a significant group of people involved in the arts, in writing, journalism and photography. In rural areas of low-population density, such as East Anglia and the East Midlands; Polish workers tend to be employed in agriculture and light industry.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The Polish Social and Cultural Association in Hammersmith which houses a number of organisations, an exhibition space, a theatre and several restaurants, is a popular venue. The Federation of Poles in Great Britain (ZPWB) which was set up to promote the interests of Poles in Great Britain acts as an umbrella for more than seventy organisations throughout the UK. Both these institutions also aim to promote awareness of Polish history and culture among British people.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Since Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004, Polish delicatessens, with regular deliveries of fresh produce from Poland, are an increasingly familiar feature along British streets and foodstuffs from Poland are supplied to most of the supermarket chains. New publications in Polish have joined the pre-existing titles, including several free magazines carrying news and features and filled with advertising are booming. A local newspaper in Blackpool is one of a handful of British newspapers to have its own online edition in Polish called "Witryna Polska".


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Many Poles who have migrated to the UK since the enlargement of the EU have brought children with them. The young families have created some pressure on schools and English-language support services. Despite language difficulties, research shows these pupils perform well in British schools, and the presence of Polish pupils in schools has appeared to improve the performance of other pupils in those schools. The Coalition Government planned to abolish exams in Polish by 2018, among other languages, at GCSE and A-Level, on the grounds that they were no longer cost-effective due to "falling popularity"; but these plans were scrapped in the wake of protests in Parliament and a petition co-ordinated by the Polish Educational Society.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: Polish newcomers to the United Kingdom follow previous patterns of ethnic integration, depending on where they can afford to live, on their educational and employment status, and on the presence of other ethnicities. In 2012 most of the 21,000 children born to Polish mothers had Polish fathers; the remainder had fathers of other backgrounds. In 2014 there were 16,656 children born with Polish mothers and fathers from European backgrounds (Other white and white British). Some 702 children were recorded as born to Polish mothers and fathers from African backgrounds, and 749 children born to Polish mothers and fathers from Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: As noted, there was an increase in Polish workers in Britain in the early twenty-first century. There were incidents of resistance or ethnic discrimination. In 2007, Polish people living in Britain reported 42 "racially motivated violent attacks" against them, compared with 28 in 2004. On 11 July 2012, the Polish Association of Northern Ireland called for action after Polish flags were burned on Eleventh Night bonfires in several locations across Belfast.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: On 26 July 2008, "The Times" published a comment piece by restaurant reviewer Giles Coren, who expressed negative sentiments towards Poles, in part due to his belief that Christian Poles had forced his Jewish ancestors to flee Poland because of anti-Semitic attacks on them after the Holocaust and the Second World War. Coren used the term "Polack" to refer to the Polish diaspora in Britain, arguing that "if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it".


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The far-right British National Party (BNP) have expressed anti-Polish sentiments in their political campaigns, and campaigned for a ban on all Polish migrant workers to Britain. The party used an image of a Second World War Spitfire fighter plane, under the slogan "Battle for Britain", during the party's 2009 European Elections campaign. But the photograph was of a Spitfire belonging to the Polish No.303 Squadron of the Royal Air Force. John Hemming, Liberal Democrat MP for Yardley, Birmingham, ridiculed the BNP for accidentally using an image of Polish aeroplanes in their campaign: "[t]hey have a policy to send Polish people back to Poland – yet they are fronting their latest campaign using this plane."


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: In January 2014, a Polish man, whose helmet was emblazoned with the flag of Poland, claimed he was attacked by a group of fifteen men outside a pub in Dagenham, London. The victim blamed speeches of then-Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron for causing the attack. During the same month in Belfast, there were seven attacks on Polish homes within ten days; stones and bricks were thrown at the windows.


title: Poles in the United Kingdom

text: The following persons are notable Poles who have lived in the United Kingdom, or notable Britons of Polish descent.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel "Erewhon" (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel "Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh", published posthumously in 1903 in an altered version titled "The Way of All Flesh", and published in 1964 as he wrote it. Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" that are still consulted.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler was born on 4 December 1835 at the rectory in the village of Langar, Nottinghamshire. His father was Rev. Thomas Butler, son of Dr. Samuel Butler, then headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later Bishop of Lichfield. Dr. Butler was the son of a tradesman and descended from a line of yeomen, but his scholarly aptitude being recognised at a young age, he had been sent to Rugby and Cambridge, where he distinguished himself.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: His only son, Thomas, wished to go into the Navy but succumbed to paternal pressure and entered the Church of England, in which he led an undistinguished career, in contrast to his father's. Samuel's immediate family created for him an oppressive home environment (chronicled in "The Way of All Flesh"). Thomas Butler, states one critic, "to make up for having been a servile son, became a bullying father."


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Samuel Butler's relations with his parents, especially with his father, were largely antagonistic. His education began at home and included frequent beatings, as was not uncommon at the time. Samuel wrote later that his parents were "brutal and stupid by nature". He later recorded that his father "never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him... I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me." Under his parents' influence, he was set on course to follow his father into the priesthood.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: He was sent to Shrewsbury at age twelve, where he did not enjoy the hard life under its headmaster Benjamin Hall Kennedy, whom he later drew as "Dr. Skinner" in "The Way of All Flesh". Then in 1854 he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a first in Classics in 1858. (The graduate society of St John's is named the Samuel Butler Room (SBR) in his honour.)


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: After Cambridge, he went to live in a low-income parish in London 1858–1859 as preparation for his ordination into the Anglican clergy; there he discovered that infant baptism made no apparent difference to the morals and behaviour of his peers and began questioning his faith. This experience would later serve as inspiration for his work "The Fair Haven". Correspondence with his father about the issue failed to set his mind at peace, instead inciting his father's wrath. As a result, in September 1859, on the ship "Roman Emperor", he emigrated to New Zealand.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler went there, like many early British settlers of materially privileged origins, to maximise distance between himself and his family. He wrote of his arrival and life as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station in "A First Year in Canterbury Settlement" (1863), and he made a handsome profit when he sold his farm, but his chief achievement during his time there consisted of drafts and source material for much of his masterpiece "Erewhon".


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: "Erewhon" revealed Butler's long interest in Darwin's theories of biological evolution. In 1863, four years after Darwin published "On the Origin of Species", the editor of a New Zealand newspaper, "The Press", published a letter captioned "Darwin among the Machines", written by Butler, but signed "Cellarius". It compares human evolution to machine evolution, prophesying that machines would eventually replace humans in the supremacy of the earth: "In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race". The letter raises many of the themes now debated by proponents of the technological singularity, for example that computers evolve much faster than humans and that we are racing toward an unknowable future through explosive technological change.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler also spent time criticising Darwin, partly because Butler (in the shadow of a previous Samuel Butler) believed that Darwin had not sufficiently acknowledged his grandfather Erasmus Darwin's contribution to his theory.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler returned to England in 1864, settling in rooms in Clifford's Inn (near Fleet Street), where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1872, the Utopian novel "Erewhon" appeared anonymously, causing some speculation as to who the author was. When Butler revealed himself, "Erewhon" made him a well-known figure, more because of this speculation than for its literary merits, which have been undisputed.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: He was less successful when he lost money investing in a Canadian steamship company and in the Canada Tanning Extract Company, in which he and his friend Charles Pauli were made nominal directors. In 1874 Butler went to Canada, "fighting fraud of every kind" in an attempt to save the company, which collapsed, reducing his own capital to £2,000.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: In 1839 his grandfather Dr Butler had left Samuel property at Whitehall in Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, so long as he survived his own father and his aunt, Dr Butler's daughter Harriet Lloyd. While at Cambridge in 1857 he sold the Whitehall mansion and six acres to his cousin Thomas Bucknall Lloyd, but kept the remaining land surrounding the mansion. His aunt died in 1880 and his father's death in 1886 resolved his financial problems for the last 16 years of his own life. The land at Whitehall was sold for housing development; he laid out and named four roads – Bishop and Canon Streets after his grandfather's and father's clerical titles, Clifford Street after his London home, and Alfred Street in gratitude to his clerk. When in the 1870s his old Shrewsbury School proposed to relocate to a site at Whitehall, Butler publicly opposed it and the school ultimately moved elsewhere.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler indulged himself, holidaying in Italy every summer and while there, producing his works on the Italian landscape and art. His close interest in the art of the Sacri Monti is reflected in "Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino" (1881) and "Ex Voto" (1888). He wrote a number of other books, including a less successful sequel, "Erewhon Revisited". His semi-autobiographical novel, "The Way of All Flesh", did not appear in print until after his death, as he considered its tone of satirical attack on Victorian morality too contentious at the time.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler died on 18 June 1902, aged 66, in a nursing home in St. John's Wood Road, London. By his wish, he was cremated at Woking Crematorium and by differing accounts, his ashes were dispersed or buried in an unmarked grave.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: George Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster were great admirers of the later Samuel Butler, who brought a new tone into Victorian literature and began a long tradition of New Zealand utopian/dystopian literature that culminated in works by Jack Ross, William Direen, Alan Marshall and Scott Hamilton.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler's sexuality has been the subject of academic speculation and debate. Butler never married, although for years he made regular visits to a woman, Lucie Dumas. Herbert Sussman, having arrived at the conclusion that Butler was homosexual, opined that Butler's sexual association with Dumas was merely an outlet for his "intense same-sex desire". Sussman's theory calls Butler's assumption of "bachelorhood" merely a means to retain middle-class respectability in the absence of matrimony; he observes that there is no evidence of Butler's having any "genital contact with other men," but alleges that the "temptations of overstepping the line strained his close male relationships."


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: His first significant male friendship was with the young Charles Pauli, son of a German businessman in London, whom Butler met in New Zealand. They returned to England together in 1864 and took neighbouring apartments in Clifford's Inn. Butler had made a large profit from the sale of his New Zealand farm and undertook to finance Pauli's study of law by paying him a regular sum, which Butler continued to do long after the friendship had cooled, until Butler had spent all his savings. On Pauli's death in 1892, Butler was shocked to learn that Pauli had benefited from similar arrangements with other men and had died wealthy, but without leaving Butler anything in his will.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: After 1878, Butler became close friends with Henry Festing Jones, whom Butler persuaded to give up his job as a solicitor to be Butler's personal literary assistant and travelling companion, at a salary of £200 a year. Although Jones kept his own lodgings at Barnard's Inn, the two men saw each other daily until Butler's death in 1902, collaborating on music and writing projects in the daytime, and attending concerts and theatres in the evenings; they also frequently toured Italy and other favourite parts of Europe together. After Butler's death, Jones edited Butler's notebooks for publication and published his own biography of him in 1919.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Another friendship was with Hans Rudolf Faesch, a Swiss student who stayed with Butler and Jones in London for two years, improving his English, before departing for Singapore. Both Butler and Jones wept when they saw him off at the railway station in early 1895, and Butler subsequently wrote an emotional poem, "In Memoriam H. R. F.," instructing his literary agent to offer it for publication to several leading English magazines. However, once the Oscar Wilde trial began in the spring of that year, with revelations of homosexual behaviour among the literati, Butler feared being associated with the widely reported scandal and in a panic wrote to all the magazines, withdrawing his poem.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: A number of critics, beginning with Malcolm Muggeridge in "The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler" (1936), concluded that Butler was a sublimated or repressed homosexual and that his lifelong status as an "incarnate bachelor" was comparable to that of his writer contemporaries Walter Pater, Henry James, and E. M. Forster, also assumed to be closeted homosexuals.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler developed a theory that the "Odyssey" came from the pen of a young Sicilian woman, and that the scenes of the poem reflected the coast of Sicily (especially the territory of Trapani) and its nearby islands. He described his evidence for this in "The Authoress of the Odyssey" (1897) and in the introduction and footnotes to his prose translation of the "Odyssey" (1900). Robert Graves elaborated on the hypothesis in his novel "Homer's Daughter".


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler argued in a lecture entitled "The Humour of Homer", delivered at The Working Men's College in London, 1892, that Homer's deities in the "Iliad" are like humans, but "without the virtue", and that he "must have desired his listeners not to take them seriously." Butler translated the "Iliad" (1898). His other works include "Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered" (1899), a theory that the sonnets, if rearranged, tell a story about a homosexual affair.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: The English novelist Aldous Huxley acknowledged the influence of "Erewhon" on his novel "Brave New World". Huxley's Utopian counterpart to "Brave New World", "Island", also refers prominently to "Erewhon". In "From Dawn to Decadence", Jacques Barzun asks, "Could a man do more to bewilder the public?"


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler belonged to no literary school and spawned no followers in his lifetime. He was a serious but amateur student of the subjects he undertook, especially religious orthodoxy and evolutionary thought, and his controversial assertions effectively shut him out from both the opposing factions of church and science that played such a large role in late Victorian cultural life: "In those days one was either a religionist or a Darwinian, but he was neither."


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: His influence on literature, such as it was, came through "The Way of All Flesh", which Butler completed in the 1880s, but left unpublished to protect his family, yet the novel, "begun in 1870 and not touched after 1885, was so modern when it was published in 1903, that it may be said to have started a new school," particularly for its use of psychoanalysis in fiction, which "his treatment of Ernest Pontifex [the hero] foreshadows."


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Whether in his satire and fiction, Butler's studies on the evidences for Christianity, his works on evolutionary thought, or in his miscellaneous other writings, a consistent theme runs through, stemming largely from his personal struggle against the stifling of his own nature by his parents, which led him to seek more general principles of growth, development, and purpose: "What concerned him was to establish his nature, his aspirations and their fulfillment upon a philosophic basis, to identify them with the nature, the aspirations, the fulfillment of all humanity – and more than that – with the fulfillment of the universe... His struggle became generalized, symbolic, tremendous."


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: The form that this search took was principally philosophical and – given the interests of the day – biological: "Satirist, novelist, artist and critic that he was, he was primarily a philosopher," and in particular, a philosopher who looked for biological foundations for his work: "His biology was a bridge to a philosophy of life which sought a scientific basis for religion and endowed a naturalistically conceived universe with a soul." Indeed, "philosophical writer" was ultimately the self-description Butler chose as most fitting to his work.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: In a book of essays published after his death entitled "God the Known and God the Unknown", Samuel Butler argued for the existence of a single, corporeal deity, declaring belief in an incorporeal deity to be essentially the same as atheism. He asserted that this "body" of God was, in fact, composed of the bodies of all living things on earth, a belief that may be classed as "panzoism". He later changed his views and decided that God was composed not only of all living things, but of all non-living things as well. He argued, however, that "some vaster Person [may] loom ... out behind our God, and ... stand in relation to him as he to us. And behind this vaster and more unknown God there may be yet another, and another, and another."


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Samuel Butler argued that each organism was not, in fact, distinct from its parents. Instead, he asserted that each being was merely an extension of its parents at a later stage of evolution. "Birth," he once quipped, "has been made too much of."


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler accepted evolution, but rejected Darwin's theory of natural selection. In his book "Evolution, Old and New" (1879) he accused Darwin of borrowing heavily from Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, while playing down these influences and giving them little credit. In 1912, the biologist Vernon Kellogg summed up Butler's views:


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler, though strongly anti-Darwinian (that is, anti-natural selection and anti-Charles Darwin) is not anti-evolutionist. He professes, indeed, to be very much of an evolutionist, and in particular one who has taken it upon his shoulders to reinstate Buffon and Erasmus Darwin, and, as a follower of these two, Lamarck, in their rightful place as the most believable explainers of the factors and method of evolution. His evolution belief is a sort of Butlerized Lamarckism, tracing back originally to Buffon and Erasmus Darwin.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Historian Peter J. Bowler has described Butler as a defender of neo-Lamarckian evolution. Bowler noted that "Butler began to see in Lamarckism the prospect of retaining an indirect form of the design argument. Instead of creating from without, God might exist within the process of living development, represented by its innate creativity."


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler's writings on evolution were criticized by scientists. Critics have pointed out that Butler admitted to be writing entertainment rather than science and his writings were not taken seriously by most professional biologists. Butler's books were negatively reviewed in "Nature" by George Romanes and Alfred Russel Wallace. Romanes stated that Butler's views on evolution had no basis from science.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Gregory Bateson often mentioned Butler and saw value in some of his ideas, calling him "the ablest contemporary critic of Darwinian evolution". He noted Butler's insight into the efficiencies of habit formation (patterns of behaviour and mental processes) in adapting to an environment:


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: ...mind and pattern as the explanatory principles which, above all, required investigation were pushed out of biological thinking in the later evolutionary theories which were developed in the mid-nineteenth century by Darwin, Huxley, etc. There were still some naughty boys, like Samuel Butler, who said that mind could not be ignored in this way – but they were weak voices, and incidentally, they never looked at organisms. I don't think Butler ever looked at anything except his own cat, but he still knew more about evolution than some of the more conventional thinkers.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: In "Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh", protagonist Ernest Pontifex says that he had been trying all his life to like modern music but succeeded less and less as he grew older. On being asked when he considers modern music to have begun, he says, "with Sebastian Bach". Butler liked only Handel, and in a letter to Miss Savage said, "I only want Handel's Oratorios. I would have said and things of that sort, but there are no 'things of that sort' except Handel's." With Henry Festing Jones, Butler composed choral works that Eric Blom characterized as "imitation Handel", although with satirical texts. Two of the works they collaborated on were the cantatas "Narcissus" (private rehearsal 1886, published 1888), and "Ulysses" (published posthumously in 1904), both for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. George Bernard Shaw wrote in a private letter that the music was invested with "a ridiculously complete command of the Handelian manner and technique." Around 1871 Butler was engaged as music critic by "The Drawing Room Gazette". From 1890 he took counterpoint lessons with W. S. Rockstro.


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: Butler's friend Henry Festing Jones wrote the authoritative biography: the two-volume "Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–1902): A Memoir" (commonly known as Jones's "Memoir"), published in 1919 and reissued by HardPress Publishing in 2013. Project Gutenberg hosts a shorter "Sketch" by Jones. More recently, Peter Raby has written a life: "Samuel Butler: A Biography" (Hogarth Press, 1991).


title: Samuel Butler (novelist)

text: "The Way of All Flesh" was published after Butler's death by his literary executor, R. A. Streatfeild, in 1903. This version, however, altered Butler's text in many ways and cut important material. The manuscript was edited by Daniel F. Howard as "Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh" (Butler's original title) and published for the first time in 1964.


title: Toast (film)

text: Toast is a British biographical comedy-drama film written and directed by S. J. Clarkson, it is based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by the cookery writer Nigel Slater. The cast includes Freddie Highmore, Helena Bonham Carter, Ken Stott and Oscar Kennedy.


title: Toast (film)

text: It received a gala at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival. As a television film it was first broadcast on BBC One on 30 December 2010 and was given a theatrical release in cinemas on 11 August 2011.


title: Toast (film)

text: In 2018, it was adapted for stage by Henry Filloux-Bennett. It first premiered at Week 53 Festival in March with a subsequent run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In April 2019, it opened in London at The Other Palace.


title: Toast (film)

text: The Slaters, consisting of Mr and Mrs. Slater, along with their young son Nigel, live in their Wolverhampton home. Their daily life revolves mostly around Mr. Slater's job at the factory and Mrs. Slater's homemaking, which is constantly hindered by her chronic debilitating asthma, while her cooking is limited to heating canned goods. Although Nigel finds comfort and encouragement to nourish his interest in culinary matters from his gentle mother, he struggles to connect with his cantankerous father, who often criticises him. He also has a crush on the handsome gardener. Whenever dinner is burnt, the standard substitute of toast is always served, which leaves a deep impression on the boy. Eventually, his mother succumbs to the illness, leaving her husband stumbling through widowhood with the same heated canned foods, frequent dinners of toast sprinkled with occasional attempts by Nigel per his friend's advice to connect with his father.


title: Toast (film)

text: The new housekeeper, married and "common" Mrs. Joan Potter, enters their life and draws Mr. Slater's attention with her sublime meals. The two start to embrace a romantic relationship despite Nigel's disdain for Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Potter's marriage. Without announcement, the Slaters move to the Herefordshire countryside along with Mrs. Potter and Nigel finds himself begrudgingly forced to co-exist with Mrs. Potter. Once he reaches teenage years, Nigel shows passion and culinary talent during home economics class cookery lessons. This prompts a silent competition for Mr. Slater's approval between the teen and Mrs. Potter that erupts when Nigel manages to bake a lemon meringue pie that rivals Mrs. Potter's supposedly unbeatable dessert.


title: Toast (film)

text: Mr. Slater eventually marries Joan and becomes more unbearable from the excessive consumption of Mrs. Potter's cooking. Nigel reaches a boiling point with his stepmother when he starts working at the local pub's restaurant to hone his skills in more sophisticated cooking, which she perceives as a threat. One day, while on a walk in the woods with the pub owner's son, who is training at ballet school, Nigel and the young man share a kiss, stirring Nigel's sexual awareness. He encourages Nigel to take a chance at the world beyond his home.


title: Toast (film)

text: Nigel, upon being informed by Joan of his father's death, declares to the newly widowed woman that she has won and resolves to move to London and establish his own life. At The Savoy Hotel, he is interviewed for a kitchen job by a toast snacking chef and hired, much to his disbelief. Nigel is reassured of his future by the chef, who gives him a chef's jacket embroidered with "Savoy London" and Nigel cracks a smile.


title: Toast (film)

text: The chief filming location was in Birmingham and Worcestershire with the Black Country Living Museum transformed into 1960's Wolverhampton, and in Walton Pool House in Clent. Principal sets were constructed in a disused bank on Broad St. The only inclement weather encountered during filming was at Penarth which resulted in script changes to reflect the cold wet conditions. Filming lasted 1 month, from 21 June to 24 July 2010.


title: Toast (film)

text: Writing for the Seattle Times, Tom Keogh gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, stating that "the movie has three things deserving of adoration: spectacular lemon-meringue pies, the songs of Dusty Springfield and Helena Bonham Carter". Gary Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times wrote that ""Toast" is by turns sweet and tart, airy and rich and, above all, a thoroughly irresistible confection", giving the movie 4 out of 5 stars. In a more mild review, Stephanie Merry of the Washington Post wrote: "For the most part, the movie feels like an emotional vacuum, mirroring the drab vanilla and mint green interiors of the Slaters' home".


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: Brothers is the sixth studio album by American rock duo The Black Keys. Co-produced by the group, Mark Neill, and Danger Mouse, it was released on May 18, 2010 on Nonesuch Records. "Brothers" was the band's commercial breakthrough, as it sold over 73,000 copies in the United States in its first week and peaked at number three on the "Billboard" 200, their best performance on the chart to that point.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: The album's lead single, "Tighten Up", the only track from the album produced by Danger Mouse, became their most successful single to that point, spending 10 weeks at number one on the Alternative Songs chart and becoming the group's first single on the "Billboard" Hot 100, peaking at number 87 and was later certified gold. The second single, "Howlin' for You", went gold as well. In April 2012, the album was certified platinum in the US by the RIAA for shipping over one million copies. It also went double-platinum in Canada and gold in the UK. In 2011, it won three Grammy Awards, including honors for Best Alternative Music Album.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: Tensions had grown within the band by 2009, and the two embarked on side projects. Guitarist/vocalist Dan Auerbach was introduced to engineer Mark Neill through friend Liam Watson, and with his assistance built his own analogue home studio at his home in Akron, Ohio (later named Easy Eye Sound System), and in late 2007, the two convened in Neill's La Mesa, California home to record. The sessions became Auerbach's solo debut "Keep It Hid", which was released in February 2009 on Nonesuch Records to positive reviews. Drummer Patrick Carney, who had not been informed of Auerbach's solo plans, was livid: "Everybody knew but me. I was mad at Dan. I was mad at our manager. I was mad at everybody." Carney was afraid Auerbach had moved on and was on the verge of quitting the band; the two hardly spoke for several months and another Black Keys recording was uncertain. Auerbach, who had played Carney the recordings but failed to mention it would see release, found it increasingly difficult to communicate with the drummer due to his antipathy for Carney's then-wife, Denise Grollmus. Auerbach said, "I really hated her from the start and didn't want anything to do with her."


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: Carney realized his anger was misdirected as he was coming off a rough divorce. He and Grollmus were married for two years but together for nine. According to the drummer, his ex-wife slept with his best friend, lied to him for several years and bilked him for money. By the end of the relationship, Carney was depressed, drinking heavily, and had gained 25 pounds. "Homeboy was miserable," Auerbach said of his bandmate "He was being manipulated mentally and emotionally." Carney eventually broke off the relationship with a phone call while his wife was in Europe. Eventually, Auerbach and Carney met to discuss how important the band was to both of them. "Then we hugged and made up and it's been all good ever since," said Auerbach. The duo soon met at Neill's La Mesa home and got to work on several ideas, notably recording "These Days", which would ultimately become the closing track on "Brothers". Things moved carefully in La Mesa when conversations shifted to Neill's old studio in Georgia. The three began discussing heading down South to complete the bulk of the album in a historic old studio. Sun Studio and Phillips Recording in Memphis, as well as Robin Hood Studios in Tyler, Texas were contenders, and the band even considered an old VFW hall in Neill's home town of Valdosta. The band desired, most of all, to get out of town and have the tracks imbued with a Southern kind of atmosphere. Logistical problems immediately surfaced with both Sun and Phillips, and Auerbach suggested Muscle Shoals Sound Studio.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: Muscle Shoals, located in northwestern Alabama, opened in April 1969 and hosted several legendary acts, most famously The Rolling Stones and Paul Simon, before it moved from its original location on Jackson Highway in 1978 to a larger, more modern facility. The studio was closed in 2005 and had not seen recording in nearly 30 years, most recently having operated as a poorly maintained museum. The studio was on a short list of legendary venues where Auerbach had always wanted to record. Neill contacted Noel Webster, the musician and entrepreneur responsible for refurbishing the old studio, who cut the band a "good day rate, albeit with the clear understanding that we were getting nothing but an empty building with a bathroom, and yes, air conditioning. So we knew right from the start that we really would be trucking in our own equipment."


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: Neill, Auerbach, and Carney arrived at Muscle Shoals Sound on August 16, 2009—coincidentally 40 years to the day singer-songwriter R. B. Greaves cut "Take a Letter Maria" at the studio, the first hit record to originate from the building. The group hauled a truckload of Auerbach's equipment from Easy Eye Sound System in Akron, as well as Neill's personal gear from California. Neill's equipment included portions of a Universal Audio 610 console (the same desk featured during the early days of Muscle Shoals) and a late 1950s Pultec panning mixer, as well as a 10:2 Studer monitoring mixer originally designed for classical music recording. The studio was very much a museum when they arrived—they found vintage recording gear that no longer operated, along with photos on the walls of legendary performers, such as Lynyrd Skynyrd, who had once recorded there. Auerbach immediately took down the photos, feeling they were distracting decorations. The band put a piece of Plexiglas on top of the studio's non-functional console to hold their own digital recording equipment. The group experienced technical difficulties while recording. However, they were not caused by the studio, but rather by utility work on nearby telephone poles. Some of Neill's equipment was wrecked, including burned-out microphones. Compositions were kept very simple due to technical limitations. Neill said, "Thanks to the Studer mixer, we seldom went beyond 10 tracks." He occasionally had to resort to digital sources; as the studio's downstairs echo chambers were long gone, Neill attached a mono digital reverberator to the Studer console. He also provided additional guitar and percussion parts during the sessions.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: The musicians stayed at the Marriott Shoals in Florence and woke early each morning, eating breakfast at a local Cracker Barrel before arriving at the studio by 10 a.m. Entering the sessions, Carney had a negative mindset due to his divorce. He said, "At the time it was really, really difficult for me because I had just split with my wife after a nine-year relationship and the last place I wanted to be was the middle of fucking nowhere in Alabama, sitting in a dark room." The first song recorded at Muscle Shoals, "Next Girl", helped shape the direction of the sessions. Auerbach's lyrics for the song about moving on resonated with the "bummed-out [and] spacey" Carney, and Auerbach noticed an improvement in his bandmate's mentality immediately after he heard them. Auerbach said, "When he heard the lyrics, he was just so stoked. The rest of the session it was smooth sailing." "Next Girl" was first cut with Carney playing drums and Auerbach playing bass, without guide vocals or the band's more usual guitar. The group continued to use a rhythm-first approach throughout the sessions, recording a basic arrangement of drums and bass before overdubbing guitar, keyboards, vocals, and percussion later. This imbued several songs, such as "Everlasting Light", "Howlin' for You", and "Sinister Kid", with a bass-driven sound. Neill found the emphasis on bass was also a result of the studio's acoustics:


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: The group found their time at Muscle Shoals to be productive and inspirational, as they recorded all day in "a kind of focused frenzy" with a sense of immediacy. Neill recalled, "Things were happening that were very, very transcendent, as soon as they began playing. First few takes, we literally couldn't believe what we were hearing. Dan and Pat were kind of looking at each other saying, 'That doesn't even sound like us.' Seriously." Much of the songs crafted were based on "idea fragments" that had been cut beforehand as demos at both Neill's and Auerbach's studios, but eventually evolved into entirely different creations as the sessions progressed. The band recorded 10 of the 15 tracks on "Brothers" in their 10 days at the studio.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: Due to the long hours working in the studio, Neill, Auerbach, and Carney generally only had time to kill at night when fewer retailers are open. Furthermore, Sheffield was remote and isolated; Neill said, "What they were complaining about is that at night, after we were done, they wanted to go swarm around and do something. There's nothing. I told them that before we went out. Unless you want to go see a movie or something, or go to Walmart and stand around under the fluorescent lights. So what did we do? We went to Walmart." Carney said that the trio were "just so bored that we were getting so fucked up every night at the hotel," and one drunken night the group stayed up watching YouTube clips of Freddie King. The following day, the musicians showed up at the studio and found a harpsichord. The band's manager had received a drunken voicemail from the band the night before asking for a harpsichord. The trio soon grew restless for a change, and after finalizing the tenth and final song at Muscle Shoals, the band left town. Back in La Mesa, Neill tweaked the multitracks, then filed the recordings away and awaited further instruction. The Black Keys eventually decided to re-work the overtly swampy tracks from Muscle Shoals using more modern machinery, and they subsequently employed producer Tchad Blake to re-mix their songs.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: The album's first single was "Tighten Up", which became The Black Keys' most successful single to that point, being the group's first song to chart on and reach number one on the Alternative Songs and Rock Songs charts. Mark C. Horn of Buzzbin Magazine described the song: "The song intros with the distinct whistling from Ennio Morricone's "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" composition, backed up by Carney's monster thump drumming and Auerbach's soulful vocal offerings." Famed producer Danger Mouse, who produced "Attack and Release", produced the song, which was recorded at Brooklyn's Bunker Studios."


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: As the label asked director Chris Marrs Piliero to do a placeholder video for "Tighten Up" as a teaser for the album, he made a low-budget video for the song, released in April 2010, with The Black Keys alongside a dinosaur puppet named Frank. Later that month, another Piliero teaser video was released, with Frank singing "Next Girl" alongside bikini-clad models. The official "Tighten Up" video, directed by Piliero, was released on May 18, 2010.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: An official video for the song "Howlin' for You" was released on February 10, 2011. Directed by Chris Marrs Piliero, the video parodied action movie trailers and starred Tricia Helfer, Diora Baird, Sean Patrick Flanery, Christian Serratos, Corbin Bernsen, Todd Bridges, and Shaun White. It was nominated for the 2011 MTV Video Music Award for Best Rock Video.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: The band appeared as the musical guest on the American sketch comedy television show "Saturday Night Live" on January 8, 2011, performing "Howlin for You" and "Tighten Up".


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: The album's art direction was designed by Michael Carney, the brother of drummer Patrick Carney. Michael wanted a change from their illustration-driven covers, and devised a simple approach, littered with messages that identify everything, such as the front saying, "This is an album by The Black Keys. The name of this album is "Brothers"". Nonesuch was initially perplexed, but once the label's marketing department approved it, he went with it. Michael said taking risks with an unconventional packaging added an incentive to purchasing physical copies, while acknowledging the minimalistic cover also helped with digital copies given "it does jump out on the iTunes page". In 2011, Michael won the Grammy Award for Best Album Package. The packaging is designed to resemble a vinyl record jacket, with the old Nonesuch logo on the front cover in the lower left, and the words "STEREO SOUND" in the upper right. The album was released as a 12-inch double LP. The "Brothers" art was compared to the front cover design of Howlin' Wolf's 1969 album, "The Howlin' Wolf Album", which reads, "This is Howlin' Wolf's new album..." Auerbach and Carney have both stated repeatedly that Howlin' Wolf was one of their greatest influences.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: When first opened, the label on the disc is almost entirely black. However, the label is heat-sensitive and turns white when played in a disc player for a long enough time. The label can also be revealed by touching the disc. On finding the heat-sensitive ink Carney told the "Los Angeles Times", "Before we started the design, I talked to the people [at the label] and said I'd heard of this ink. Literally, every ink supplier was contacted. People are really open to making new packaging." On Australian copies of the album, the disc is white with black text; on the European copies the disc is silver with black text.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: The font used, Cooper Black, is used on the iconic Muscle Shoals Sound Studio (where the album was recorded) '3614 Jackson Highway' board and has been used by other bands, including The Doors on "L.A. Woman", "In It for the Money" by Supergrass, the first three of The Fratellis albums, Tyler, The Creator's "Goblin" and the cover of "Pet Sounds" by The Beach Boys.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: "Brothers" garnered critical acclaim. According to review aggregator website Metacritic, the album has an average critic review score of 82/100. "Rolling Stone" magazine placed the album at No. 2 on the Best Albums of 2010 and "Everlasting Light" at No. 11 on the Best Songs of 2010. The album was also featured on "Spin"s Top 40 Albums of 2010 and "Paste" magazine's 50 Best Albums of 2010. "Time" magazine ranked it number seven on its list of 2010's Top 10 Albums. The album was also included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: The album was nominated for five 2011 Grammy Awards the biggest win being Best Alternative Music Album beating out eventual Album Of The Year winner, Arcade Fire's The Suburbs. The single "Tighten Up" won the award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals and was nominated for Best Rock Song. "Black Mud" was nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. The fifth nomination was for Grammy Award for Best Recording Package, which Michael Carney won for designing the album artwork.


title: Brothers (The Black Keys album)

text: "Brothers" was also the band's commercial breakthrough, as it sold over 73,000 copies in the United States in its first week and peaked at number three on the "Billboard" 200, their best performance on the chart to that point. By the time follow-up "El Camino" was about to be released in 2011, "Brothers" had sold 814,000 copies in the U.S.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The San Diego Trolley is a light rail system operating in the metropolitan area of San Diego. It is known colloquially as "The Trolley". The Trolley's operator, San Diego Trolley, Inc. (SDTI), is a subsidiary of the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS). The Trolley began service on July 26, 1981, making it the oldest of the second-generation light rail systems in the United States. The Trolley system serves 62 stations, comprises of route, three primary lines (Blue Line, Orange Line, and Green Line) that operate daily, and one heritage line (Silver Line) that operates on a circuit of downtown on select days. In , the Trolley had the fifth highest ridership of light rail systems in the United States, with annual rides, or about per weekday as of .


title: San Diego Trolley

text: Electric rail service in San Diego traces its roots back to 1891 when John D. Spreckels incorporated the San Diego Electric Railway. San Diego's streetcar system had been replaced with buses in 1949, and by 1966 the local bus company, San Diego Transit, was facing a financial crisis and public takeover.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: Planning for mass transit in the San Diego region began in 1966 under the auspices of the Comprehensive Planning Organization (CPO, now known as the San Diego Association of Governments, SANDAG), an intergovernmental agency of 13 cities and San Diego County.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: Over the next decade, the CPO researched various technologies were studied including improvements to local buses, express buses, heavy rail, light rail, and advanced technologies. The CPO also closely studied the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, then under construction. Ultimately, the early studies went nowhere due to disagreements between stakeholders and a lack of funding.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In 1975, the CPO published the Regional Transportation Plan which included intermediate capacity fixed guideway system (an untested technology at the time) at a cost of $1.5 billion.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In the early 1970s, three state legislative acts would set the stage for the construction of mass transit in the San Diego region.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: Transportation Development Act, signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1971, earmarked 0.25 percent of the state sales tax for funding transportation projects, including mass transit. A 1974 amendment to Article 19 of the Constitution of California permitted the use of gas tax revenues, previously reserved for highway construction, for construction of rail systems. Finally, a 1975 law established the San Diego Metropolitan Transit Development Board (MTDB) with a clear mission: design, construct and operate a guideway transit system. The entire process was assigned to MTDB to assure accountability. The legislation was written and supported by State Senator James R. Mills, the President Pro Tem during this period and a strong transit advocate.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The MTDB formally started operations on January 1, 1976. The MTDB's enabling legislation and principles adopted by the Board required the planning give added weight to systems that satisfy a number of criteria: priority consideration for technologies available and in use, a system that is capable of being brought into operation incrementally, and using rights-of-way owned by public entities to minimize construction costs.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In December 1976, the MTDB launched its 18-month Guideway Planning Project to be held in two phases. Phase 1 involved the evaluation of potential corridors based on the CPO's 1975 Regional Transportation Plan and was guided by principles set by the MTDB board: the corridor should extend a long-distance and offer high-speed operation, the system should be at grade in a mostly exclusive right-of-way, capital costs should be low, and operating deficits should be minimized. Phase 1 studied over 100 miles of potential corridors with 45 miles of corridor recommended for further evaluation in Phase 2. At about the same time, a working paper presented an evaluation of four guideway technologies: light rail, two categories of heavy rail, and Automated Small Vehicle Transit.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In August 1977, the MTDB board selected the South Bay region for the detailed Phase 2 study. There would be several potential corridors to consider, including along freeways (Interstate highways I-5, I-8 & I-805 and State Routes 94 & 16), along existing railroad rights-of-way, and arterial roads.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In October 1977 the board selected light rail as the lone guideway transit technology to be studied (it would also be compared to several all-bus alternatives). In making the decision to pursue light rail, the MTBD board said it best followed the principles it laid out as light rail can offer high-speed travel, the right-of-way is flexible, and construction costs can be low when at-grade construction is maximized. The technology was new for the United States, but was well established in Germany.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: On September 10, 1976, nature intervened, setting off a chain of events that would help decide the corridor to be used.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: Hurricane Kathleen destroyed parts of San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway (SD&AE) Desert Line, at the time owned by Southern Pacific (SP) railroad. The SD&AE offered freight service between San Diego and points east with a line that traveled between Downtown San Diego, San Ysidro, Northern Mexico, and Imperial County before connecting with the rest of the SP system in Plaster City, California. The hurricane caused $1.3 million worth of damage to the line ($ adjusted for inflation), primarily in Imperial County, east of San Diego. Freight service was suspended, and in light of the extensive damages, SP petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to abandon the SD&AE on August 9, 1977.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The MTDB immediately began studying the SD&AE corridor between Downtown San Diego and the San Ysidro Port of Entry for joint use by electric light rail and freight trains. In June 1978, the MTDB found the entire joint-use project feasible.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: At the same time, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors became concerned about the potential loss of freight service on the SD&AE, which was seen as vital to the county's economic interests and the continued viability of San Diego as a deep-water port. The county commissioned its own study to examine using a portion of the SD&AE tracks for passenger service which would share the track with freight services, the motivation being the transit services could share the costs of maintaining the tracks. San Diego County proposed operating either commuter rail trains or self-powered diesel rail cars.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In 1978, the Interstate Commerce Commission denied the request to abandon the SD&AE, prompting Southern Pacific to offer the railroad for sale to anyone willing to maintain freight operations on the line. The MTDB stepped in and offered to buy the SD&AE for $18.1 million if the Southern Pacific fully repaired the hurricane-damaged line. The deal closed on August 20, 1979, with the final acquisition occurring on November 1, 1979. The MTDB quickly secured a deal with the San Diego and Imperial Valley Railroad to continue freight service along the line.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The purchase gave MTDB ownership of two sections of right-of-way that could be used for mass transit: the SD&AE Main Line from Downtown San Diego to San Ysidro, and the SD&AE La Mesa Branch from Downtown San Diego to El Cajon.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: With all the planning in place, construction of the "South Line" transit corridor (the southern portion of today's Blue Line) was able to begin just one month after acquisition in December 1979 and would be accomplished in two phases.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The first phase of the project cost $86 million, which included the purchase of the SD&AE, 14 light rail vehicles, construction of a single-tracked electrified light rail line along the SD&AE Main Line and construction of a section of new street running tracks in Downtown San Diego. To control costs, only minor rehabilitation was conducted on the SD&AE corridor, with the MTDB replacing about 40% of the ties, welding the jointed rail, constructing electric catenaries, and installing an absolute block signal system.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: Funding for the project came entirely from Transportation Development Act state sales tax and local gas tax revenues. Federal funds were not actively sought due to the locally perceived notion that San Diego would not qualify due to low population densities, uncongested highways, and undefined corridors.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In August 1980, the MTDB established San Diego Trolley, Inc. to operate and maintain the new light rail system and on July 26, 1981, service began. Trains operated every 20 minutes (timed to meet at four passing tracks on the single track sections) between 5 am and 9 pm and carried approximately 10,000 passengers a day.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In light of the strong ridership, construction of the second phase was started almost immediately, which involved double-tracking the SD&AE corridor and purchasing 10 additional vehicles. Upon completion of double-tracking in February 1983, the total cost of the project was $116.6 million.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The San Diego Trolley added a second line on March 23, 1986, that shared the same Downtown tracks and traveled east to Euclid Avenue on the La Mesa Branch of the SD&AE. The new route was called then called the Euclid Line (today's Orange Line). This line was extended to El Cajon by June 23, 1989, at which time it was renamed the East Line. Service was expanded beyond the old SD&AE right-of-way when the line was extended further east to Santee on August 26, 1995.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The East Line's Bayside Connection extension to the Convention Center and Gaslamp Quarter opened on June 30, 1990. Later in the decade, the South Line was extended to the north, reaching Little Italy on July 2, 1992, and Old Town on June 16, 1996.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The system was further expanded with Mission Valley Line that opened on November 23, 1997, and extended tracks north from Old Town to Fashion Valley Mall, San Diego Stadium, and Mission San Diego de Alcalá. At that the same time, the South Line (which now traveled north of San Diego) and East Line of the system were renamed the Blue Line and the Orange Line, respectively.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: One of the system's most ambitious expansions, the Mission Valley East extension, opened on July 10, 2005. The Mission Valley East extension built the only underground station in the system at San Diego State University and inaugurated the third route in the San Diego Trolley system, the Green Line. The line also featured the first low-floor trolley vehicles, that allow passengers to board without climbing stairs and allowed passengers using wheelchairs to use a small bridge plate instead of the slower lifts on the older trains. But, the new vehicles could only operate on the Green Line, forcing passengers heading between Mission Valley and Downtown San Diego to change trains in Old Town.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In the late 2000s, as parts of the San Diego Trolley approached 30 years old, the system was in need of an overhaul of its oldest facilities. Also, after the success of the low-floor trolley cars on the Green Line, the MTS wanted to operate similar vehicles on all lines.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: Officials secured $660 million in funding after the 2008 election as voters passed the TransNet half-cent local sales tax and two statewide transportation bond measures. The project also received funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and federal formula funds.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The "Trolley Renewal Project" would entail several improvements. Each station would get larger shelters to provide more protection from sun and rain, new benches, and digital “next arrival” signs. Worn-out infrastructure was replaced as needed, including rails, ties, catenary wires, power lines and electrical substations. The project also included a new signalling system that will allow two freight trains to operate at night, rather than one.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: To enable the switch to a low-floor light rail vehicle (LRV) fleet, platforms at 35 stations would need to be raised from either ground level or sidewalk level () to . Stations also needed a new "safety edge tile" with a smooth surface in the center to allow wheelchair ramps to deploy (the existing safety tile would stop ramps from fully deploying). The other complication of the switch to low-floor LRVs was that the traditional Siemens S70, like those ordered for the Green Line, were over long, so a three-car train would not fit within Downtown San Diego's blocks. The MTS teamed up with the Utah Transit Authority, which faced a similar problem with its system. The solution for both agencies was a specialized design Siemens called the S70 US ("Ultra Short") which retains the low-floor design, but would be the same length as the older high-floor vehicles ().


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The MTS and SANDAG agreed to purchase a total of 65 vehicles, which would arrive between September 2011 and January 27, 2015. However, there was not enough funding to replace all 123 high-floor cars at once. The decision was made to retire the original Siemens-Duewag U2 LRVs, and operate three-car trains with the new low-floor LRVs in the front and back, and an older high-floor Siemens SD-100 car in the middle.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In late 2010, work to rebuild the stations started at the Old Town Transit Center and worked south. By September 2, 2012, work was completed on the Old Town and Bayshore lines, allowing for a realignment of service. The Green Line was extended from its former western terminus in Old Town south to 12th & Imperial Transit Center's Bayside Terminal platform, while the Orange Line was truncated to Santa Fe Depot and the Blue Line to America Plaza. The new alignment means all lines now pass through downtown and created a universal transfer point for all lines at 12th & Imperial Transit Center.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: By January 9, 2013, all stations on the Orange Line had been rebuilt, allowing low-floor LRVs to begin service on a second line.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: Rebuilding of the remaining stations (all on the Blue Line) was completed by January 27, 2015, The project, including remaining station and track renovations, was completed in late 2015.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: In 2011, SANDAG received key approval for the Mid-coast extension of the Blue Line, running from the Old Town Transit Center to the University City community, serving major activity and employment centers such as the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) campus, three major hospitals on (and adjacent to) the campus, and University Towne Centre (UTC) shopping center. Construction began in October 2016, and train testing on the line began in late June 2021. The Mid-Coast extension opened on November 21, 2021.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: The Blue Line was re-extended north from its original northern terminus at America Plaza to run through five existing stations (up to and including its pre-2012 terminus, the Old Town Transit Center), and continuing to nine new trolley stations: Tecolote Road, Clairemont Drive, Balboa Avenue, Nobel Drive, VA Medical Center, UCSD West/Pepper Canyon, UCSD East/Voigt Drive, Executive Drive, and UTC. The northern terminal station, UTC, is part of the UTC Transit Center, at Westfield UTC in the University City/UCSD area.


title: San Diego Trolley

text: , trolley service operates on three daily lines: the Blue, Green, and Orange Lines, and traveling through 65 total miles of mostly double-track rail and serving 62 stations. A fourth line, the heritage streetcar Silver Line, operates more limited weekday and weekend service, in a clockwise 'circle-loop' around downtown San Diego only.