Every design for Piastów

Piastów presses right up against Warsaw's Ursus district, with Pruszków, Michałowice and Ożarów Mazowiecki on its other sides – a compact town that grew up in the slipstream of the capital. In the Middle Ages there was no Piastów at all, only the villages of Żdżary and Utrata.

Its position on the line west out of Warsaw made it. When the Warsaw–Vienna Railway was extended, housing for railway workers went up here, red-brick buildings locals still call "czerwoniaki", and the settlement took shape around them. Warsaw families came looking for quiet, and in 1926 the residents picked the name Piastów from eleven suggestions, the winner being a fourteen-year-old scout. Factories for accumulators and rubber followed, and town rights came in 1952. The war years left their mark too: Poles expelled from Poznań and later from Wola found refuge here, and a hospital for infectious diseases sheltered refugees and Jews from the Germans.

Today the Tężnia solankowa w Piastowie draws neighbours to breathe the salty air, and the trains still run to the city. However far you go, getting off at Piastów station feels like coming home.