Plac Wolności, Liberty Square, was planned before it was built. In the 1820s, Łódź’s designers drew this octagon as the heart of a “new town”, with its markets and main institutions gathered around it.

For decades it worked. Then, in the late 1800s, tram lines cut through and ringed the square, and the markets had to go. It became a roundabout with a monument stranded in the middle. That monument, to Tadeusz Kościuszko, went up in 1930, was dynamited by the Nazis in 1939 and was rebuilt in 1960.

By the 2000s the square was a thoroughfare, not a place to gather. In 2024 the city unveiled its answer: grass, trees and fountains.

Two VoiceMap tours meet here. One ends at the square, reading its modest 1827 town hall, its church that turned from Protestant to Catholic and its underground sewer museum as chapters of that story. The other begins here and sets off down Piotrkowska.