English: Łódź first appears in records in the fourteenth century. It was granted town rights in 1423 by the Polish King Władysław II Jagiełło and it remained a private town of the Kuyavian bishops and clergy until the late eighteenth century. In the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, Łódź was annexed to Prussia before becoming part of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw; the city joined the Duchy of Warsaw, a Russian client state, at the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
The Second Industrial Revolution (from 1870) brought rapid growth in textile manufacturing and in population owing to the inflow of migrants. Following the industrialization of the area, the city has been multinational and struggled with social inequalities (as documented in the novel ’The Promised Land’). The contrasts greatly reflected on the architecture of the city, where luxurious mansions coexisted with red-brick factories and dilapidated tenement houses. The industrial development and demographic surge made Łódź one of the largest cities in Poland.
The Scotch Mist Gallery contains many photographs of historic buildings, monuments and memorials of Poland.