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The Brochów housing estate is only 8 kilometres from the Old Town in Wrocław. However, in the minds of many people, it is still considered much more remote and therefore rarely mentioned in travel guides or tourist blogs. Yet in comparison with other suburban developments in Wrocław, Brochów appears to be one of the most interesting, both in terms of its social structure and architecture. The history of Brochów also hides a lot of interesting moments, which are unprecedented in other parts of the city.

For centuries Brochów (German: Brockau) was a typical village near Wrocław. It was first mentioned in 1193 as an endowment of the Augustinian Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Piasek, donated by the legendary magnate Piotr Włost. The settlement survived in this legal form until the secularization of the church property in 1810.

Brochów, like other villages near Wrocław, was an important source of fruit and vegetables for the growing city. To this day many manor houses can be found there. The local climate was so favourable that pineapples and extremely valuable bitter oranges could be grown in the garden of the non-existent capitular palace from the early 18th century.

A turning point in Brochów’s history came with the development of the railroad. In 1896, the largest marshalling yard in Central Europe was opened here. This huge investment, part of the project of expanding the Prussian railroads, changed Brochów forever, but also had a significant impact on the economy of the whole Silesia. Coal from the Upper Silesian mines was transported to the West through the village. A considerable number of workers were needed to operate such a complex infrastructure (still one of the largest in Europe). Due to the influx of people from the countryside arriving to work in the railway industry, the village of Brochów went through a period of intensive urbanisation and transformed into a small town with a working-class character. By 1905, more than 7,000 people lived here.

Soon a development of tenement houses was built here, followed by an estate of single-family houses in the “garden city” style. Brochów also received an eclectic town hall, a primary and secondary school, a post office and a police station. The most unique buildings, however, are those built in their modernist style in the interwar period: a parish church, a fire station and a housing estate for railway workers.

Until 1945, Brochów was a flourishing town with its own infrastructure and two newspapers. In many respects, especially in terms of urban planning and organisation, it was a model workers’ settlement. All the infrastructure was there to compensate the workers for their hard and poorly paid work. Above all, it made Brochów function like a well-oiled machine on which the much larger Wrocław depended. The town was self-sufficient and economically privileged. For this reason, it was not annexed to Wrocław during the great expansion of the city in 1928.

A dark page in the history of Brochów was the Second World War. It is worth noting that railway workers as a professional group largely supported the Nazi government in 1933 and its actions, among other things playing a key role in the plan to exterminate the Jewish community. In the 1940s, Brochów was the site of a railroad labour camp that imprisoned mainly people from the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine. In February 1945, the Nazis executed the mayor of Brochów, Bruno Kurzbach (some sources say this happened in front of the town hall).

Brochów emerged from the siege of Festung Breslau relatively unscathed, considering the scale of destruction in the surrounding towns. Soon Polish railway workers began to arrive here (the Brochów railway station was one of the repatriation stations) in order to reactivate the railway junction, which was crucial for the rebuilding of the so-called Recovered Territories. These were people from various regions of the country, as well as from the former eastern borderlands. As was the case in other countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc, the communist government was particularly concerned with the development of heavy industry, including railroads, and the maintenance of railroad infrastructure. However, despite these efforts, the town never regained its former self-sufficiency and lost many connections with Wrocław. Paradoxically, Brochów became a transit desert for several decades, even though it was incorporated into the administrative boundary of Wrocław at the beginning of 1951.

In the 1960s, Roma families from the Bergitka Roma and Polska Roma groups, who had led a nomadic lifestyle until the 1960s, settled here. Brochów continues to have the largest concentration of the Roma community in Wrocław, with rich cultural traditions. Among the Brochów Roma community, musical traditions have always been present, passed down from generation to generation. In 1965, the Bacht Gypsy Song and Dance Ensemble was founded by Franciszek Szoma. A Roma community centre and sports teams also functioned here for many years.

Brochów went through a difficult period in its history after the discontinuation of many railway connections in the 1990s. Today, it is one of the fastest developing urban enclaves in Wrocław.