Chris Upton finds that the region's Polish community is not a new development.

These days we’re getting used to hearing the Polish language, and seeing the odd Polish shop, on our streets. My own Polish language skills do not stretch much beyond ‘djenkuye’ and ‘dobri den’, but I’m perfectly prepared to throw them in to impress a waitress or a shop assistant.

Then I find that she’s from Bulgaria.

Worse still, when I try to use Polish it sounds like Russian, which was the only Slavic language I learnt at school. This doesn’t go down well.

Nevertheless, a Polish community has very definitely been added to the galaxy of peoples that make up the West Midlands.

But by no means did this begin with the implementation of European employment law in 2004. Polish people had been a presence in the region long before that.

Many of the Jews who inhabited Birmingham’s back-to-back courts in the middle of the 19th century were, if you wished to put a nationality on them, from Poland, running from the pogroms of Eastern Europe.

(The Poles, by the way, call this Central Europe; it’s just that the UK that is way out west.)

There’s probably no better to see the Polish community maturing and putting down roots than in Leamington Spa. You only have to look at their community centre in the High Street, occupying the most impressive piece of neo-classicism in the old town. Dating from 1830, this served as Leamington’s town hall until something much grander (but less stylish) was cooked up across the river in the new town. Today the old council chamber is a Polish Catholic church.

When the then-mayor of Leamington officially opened the converted centre back in 1969, he was quick to point out (call this good briefing) that Leamington Spa and Poland went back a very long way together. Well over a century earlier – in 1838 – the town hall had hosted a reception for Prince Louis Napoleon (the future Napoleon III), and among the guests was the Prince’s constant companion, Colonel Kazimierz Oborski.

Oborski himself had commanded Napoleon Bonaparte’s personal guard during the infamous invasion of Russia, and fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1830. Without a country to return to, Colonel Oborski had chosen to settle in Leamington instead, living in a house in Russell Street. His last resting-place is in the town.

But the good colonel, for all his obvious strengths, could not be called a community.

That had to wait for the Second World War. In 1939 Poland found itself in the middle of a none-too-pleasant sandwich, with Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other, neither of whom had much time for Poles.