Many Polish Jews fled their partitioned homeland, and most emigrated to the United States, but some settled in British cities, especially London, Manchester, Leeds and Kingston upon Hull.

[17] The Polish government-in-exile, though denied majority international recognition after 1945, remained at its post in London until it formally dissolved in 1991, after a democratically elected president had taken office in Warsaw.

The European Union's 2004 enlargement and the UK Government's decision to allow immigration from the new accession states, encouraged Polish people to move to Britain rather than to Germany.

In the 16th century, when most grain imports to the British Isles came from Poland, Polish merchants and diplomats regularly travelled there, usually on the Eastland Company trade route from Gdańsk to London.

In 1790, King Stanislaus Augustus sent Michał Kleofas Ogiński (also a composer and mentor to Frederic Chopin) on an embassy to London to meet with Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger.

The British were prepared, along with the Dutch, to propose a favourable commercial treaty for Polish goods, especially flax, if Poland ceded the cities of Gdańsk and Toruń to the Prussians.

[25] During the November 1830 Uprising against the Russian Empire, British military equipment and armaments were sent to Poland, facilitated by the presence of Leon Łubieński studying at Edinburgh University at the time and the swift despatch to Britain of his uncle, Józef, to secure the shipment.

[30] Czartoryski's permanent representative at the Court of St James's was General Count Władysław Stanisław Zamoyski, who later led a division in the Crimean War on the British side against Russia.

Perhaps the most famous Polish person to settle in Britain at the end of the 19th century, having gained British citizenship in 1886, was the seafarer turned early modernist novelist, Józef Korzeniowski, better known by his pen name, Joseph Conrad.

He was the highly influential author of such works as Almayer's Folly, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Under Western Eyes and Victory, many of which have been turned into films.

The resurgence of an independent Poland in 1918, briefly complicated by the Polish–Soviet War from 1918 to 1920, enabled the country to rapidly reorganise its polity, develop its economy, and resume its place in international forums.

Until the Germans' April 1943 discovery of mass graves of 28,000 executed Polish military reserve officers at Katyn, near Smolensk in Russia, Sikorski had wished to work with the Soviets.

Five weeks before the outbreak of war, in late July 1939, Rejewski and his fellow cryptologists, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki had disclosed to French and British intelligence in Warsaw the techniques and technologies they had developed for "breaking" German Enigma ciphers.

It effected a major evacuation during the Battle of Narvik and completed hundreds of convoys on the Mediterranean Sea and on the Atlantic, before being surrendered to the control of the communist authorities in Warsaw in 1946.

But at Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill acquiesced in Stalin's Soviet Union annexation of the Kresy lands (roughly half of pre-war Poland's landmass), in accordance with the provisions of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.

"[57] During the debate, 25 MPs and Peers risked their future political careers to draft an amendment protesting against the UK's acceptance of a geographically reconfigured Poland's integration into the Soviet sphere of influence, thereby shifting it westwards into the heart of Europe.

[18][62] Polish arrivals to the UK included survivors of German concentration and POW camps and war wounded needing additional help adapting to civilian life.

Among its many commemorative plaques is one to a clairvoyant and healer housewife and Soviet deportee, Waleria Sikorzyna: she had had a detailed premonitory dream two years before the 1939 invasion of Poland, but was politely dismissed by the Polish military authorities.

[70] In both cases, the original mainly political migrants were drawn largely from elite and educated strata and reflected the heterogeneity of their class, and they quickly established cultural institutions such as libraries and learned societies.

They began on 7 September 1939 with coded messages among prosaic material for the Polish Underground and after expansion into English by radio ended on 23 December 2005, a victim of budgetary cuts and new priorities.

Grabowski promoted Polish and other diaspora artists, such as Pauline Boty, Frank Bowling, Józef Czapski, Stanisław Frenkiel, Bridget Riley and Aubrey Williams.

This act symbolized the legitimate transfer of independent Poland's seals of office and put an end to the political opposition that, for half a century, had both dogged and been the bedrock of the Polish diaspora in the United Kingdom.

Initially they sent food parcels and medicines as Poland recovered from the ravages of war then the assistance changed to money transfers, sometimes from their own meagre pensions, in the belief that they were still better off living in freedom.

Only with the accession of Edward Gierek in 1970 as First Secretary of the Polish Workers' Party (PZPR), who himself had spent time as a migrant in France and Belgium, did it become possible for Poles to leave their country with relative ease.

Then, as the first generation of émigrés settled in various urban areas, often clustered around Polish clubs and churches, their graves and memorials began to appear in nearby existing cemeteries.

[105][106] over entrants from these accession states,[107][108] Seven-year temporary restrictions on benefits that EU citizens including Poles could claim, covered by the Worker Registration Scheme, ended in 2011.

Additionally on 20 October 2007, a campaign was launched by the British Polish Chamber of Commerce called "Wracaj do Polski" ('Come Back to Poland') which encouraged Poles living and working in the UK to return home.

[119] Following immigration after Poland's accession to the EU, the Office for National Statistics estimated that 832,000 Polish-born residents lived in the UK by 2018, making Poles the largest overseas-born group, having outgrown the Indian-born population.

Outside London, the largest Polish communities are in: Birmingham, Southampton, Slough (8,341; 5.9%), Luton, Leeds, Peterborough, Nottingham, Manchester, Leicester, Coventry and the Borough of Boston in Lincolnshire (2,975; 4.6%).

Coren used the term "Polack" to refer to the Polish diaspora in Britain, arguing that "if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it".