The White Factory in Łódź — Geyer's cotton mill and the textile museum

A Saxon clothier and sixty horsepower

Ludwik Geyer arrived in Łódź from Saxony in 1828 and started with a workshop of a dozen or so looms. Seven years later he was building on an entirely different scale. The main block, at what was then the southern edge of Piotrkowska Street, went up between 1835 and 1837, and the fully equipped mill started work in 1839.

It was all done on credit. The Bank of Poland lent Geyer four hundred thousand złoty on preferential terms, with a deposit loan and money from the municipal treasury on top. The machinery came from Belgium, from the Cockerill brothers, then among Europe's leading makers of textile equipment.

Late in 1838 Geyer fired up a steam engine rated at sixty horsepower — the first in the Łódź textile industry, and by some accounts the first anywhere in the Kingdom of Poland. Two years later the works employed around six hundred people, with spinning, weaving, dyeing and fabric printing under one roof, a combination no one in this part of Europe had attempted before.

Why white

The name needs no explaining: the elevations were rendered in white plaster, which in Łódź turned out to be the exception. The great mills of the later nineteenth century — Scheibler's at Księży Młyn, Poznański's on Ogrodowa — were built of bare red brick, so Geyer's pale building came to be recognised by its colour alone.

The style is classicism, and the plan owes more to a townhouse than to a factory shed: four wings around a closed courtyard, regular window bays, a portico in the middle of the west front. The west wing, the one facing Piotrkowska, is the oldest part. A three-storey pavilion was added as early as 1838, a second in the 1840s, and the east wing only in 1886 — that one was left unplastered.

The old boiler house stands in the courtyard, a tall chimney rises above the roofs, and two dust towers and two water towers survive alongside the buildings. For a works dating from the first half of the nineteenth century, that is an unusually complete set of industrial fittings. To the south the site adjoins a pond, what remains of an old mill pond on the Jasień stream.

From the Geyers to Eskimo to a museum

The firm stayed in family hands through the cotton famine of 1862, the First World War and the depression of 1929 to 1933, trading until the Second World War as the Ludwik Geyer Cotton Works. After the industry was nationalised, production here continued under the state enterprise "Eskimo".

In 1955 the White Factory was chosen to house a museum of textiles; conversion work began three years later, and the institution has been independent since 1 January 1960. It has carried the name Central Museum of Textiles since 1975.

Mill and museum went on sharing the building for decades, though. Production in the east wing ended in 1990 and the wing itself passed to the museum in 2002, which is when the whole quadrangle finally came under one roof in practice as well as on paper. The complex entered the heritage register in 1964 and again, under its present number, in 1971.

What the collection holds

The museum keeps some seventy thousand items: fabrics from manufacturing centres across Europe, Asia and the Americas, folk weaving, pattern books, sample sets and machines, a number of which can still be set running after conservation. Its strongest holding, however, is art textiles made since 1945, and that is what gives the place its international standing.

The White Factory is also where the International Triennial of Tapestry began, a survey of contemporary fibre art held every three years that draws artists from dozens of countries; the eighteenth edition opened in October 2025. The Harnam song and dance ensemble is based in the complex as well.

In 2023 the site joined the European Route of Industrial Heritage, one of three Łódź entries on the route alongside Manufaktura and the EC1 power station.

Wooden Łódź behind the mill

Immediately behind the works, in Reymont Park, the museum has assembled relocated timber buildings on about six thousand square metres: eight structures from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They include five craftsmen's houses from streets around the city, a larch-built church from Nowosolna put up around the middle of the nineteenth century as a Protestant meeting house, a summer villa from Ruda Pabianicka, and a tram shelter of 1901 brought in from Zgierz.

The open-air museum has been renamed the Łódź Park of Urban Culture, because the story it tells has changed too: the permanent display of Łódź micro-histories is less about carpentry than about life in a working-class flat — the kitchen, the workshop, the yard. It takes under an hour and sits well alongside the factory halls.

Getting there

• On foot along Piotrkowska — the mill closes the street off to the south at number 282/284; walking the whole length from Freedom Square is a good four kilometres.
• By train — from Łódź Fabryczna and Łódź Kaliska stations, finish the journey by tram or bus, or on foot heading south down Piotrkowska.
• By public transport — the southern stretch of Piotrkowska is an ordinary street with stops, and the adjacent Plac Niepodległości is one of the city's main interchanges.
• By car — the site sits on the road out towards Pabianice, on the approach side from the southern ring of the conurbation.

Worth knowing

Two hours is a sensible allowance for the museum itself; add the timber park behind it and you are looking at half a day. The courtyard and the outer elevations can also be taken in simply by walking past on a Piotrkowska stroll.

The visit pays off most as part of a wider loop through industrial Łódź: Scheibler's Księży Młyn, Manufaktura in Poznański's mill and the EC1 power station each tell a later chapter of the same story. Geyer's factory is where it starts, and the oldest link still standing.

How to get there and practical info

Location

282/284 Piotrkowska Street, Łódź, Łódź Voivodeship — the southern end of Piotrkowska, by Plac Niepodległości

Built

main block 1835–1837, in full operation from 1839; further wings 1838, the 1840s and 1886

Layout

four classicist wings around a courtyard, old boiler house, chimney, two dust towers and two water towers

In use today as

the Central Museum of Textiles, the Łódź Park of Urban Culture with its timber buildings, and the Harnam ensemble

Heritage status

heritage register since 1964; part of the Historic Monument "Łódź — the multicultural landscape of an industrial city", designated by order of the President of Poland on 16 February 2015

Time needed

about two hours for the museum, half a day including the timber park

Current opening times and tickets

website of the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź

When to go