As recently as 2013, a British tabloid published a hatchet piece under a headline that proclaimed: “The Polish city that moved to Britain.” Having painted a gruesome picture of “derelict buildings and boarded-up businesses,” the article finished on an equally gloomy note by describing elderly people queuing for everyday staples like bread.

By this stage, however, Łódź was well accustomed to being treated with disdain.

Emerging as a major textile hub during the Industrial Revolution, what had hitherto been an irrelevant farming community ballooned in a short span of time to become the beating heart of the Russian Empire’s manufacturing industry.

Drawn by the promise of untold riches, workers and entrepreneurs flocked in droves to Łódź, with this migratory wave earning it the nickname of The Promised Land. Wealth, though, was counterbalanced by poverty, and the city’s name became synonymous with grimy factories and densely packed slums.

Its reputation would plunge further following the fall of Communism in 1989. With state subsidies removed, the city’s factories fell silent and slid towards bankruptcy.

The problems kept mounting—by the beginning of the millennium, the city was plagued by mafia wars, battling football gangs, a ‘bodies in the barrel’ murder investigation and a lurid ‘cash for corpses’ affair that scandalized the local health service.

But if Łódź was once an advert for cancerous urban ills, the last few years have seen it blossom into a trendy hub of entrepreneurial endeavor and artistic activity.

In fact, just arriving in the city by train today promises a buzz—alighting at Fabryczna station, it’s impossible not to be wowed by its breathtaking dimensions and the steel and glass canopy arcing over the lilywhite townhouse facades that line the main hall.

But as impressive as the station is, it is not the town’s calling card—for that, many would refer to Off Piotrkowska. Identified a few years back by CNN as being home to “Europe’s hippest micro-scene,” this once-abandoned factory has been resuscitated as a progressive social hub.

Now bristling with lively cafes, cocktail dens, local fashion boutiques, culinary studios and ethnic restaurants, the steady gentrification of this once raw and gritty space has not impacted its originality. Fourteen years after it first opened, Off Piotrkowska has come to characterize the city’s energetic sparkle and creative undercurrent.

Yet this creativity is not confined to the city’s bars and hangouts, and evidence of that can be seen on the walls of Łódź.

In the space of a decade, approximately 80 XL-sized murals were created, many of these painted by globally recognized street artists.

These artworks—often radical and surreal—have given Łódź a positive identity and placed it firmly on the international radar during the peak hipster era of the early 2010s. At long last, Łódź felt like a place to visit rather than flee.

Lending the city a visible artsy edge, this spectacular outbreak of ‘mural-osis’ was aided by the high headcount of decrepit, unloved walls that could serve as canvases.

Even these, though, are now diminishing in number. Once seen as disheveled, sooty husks, the city’s empty factory spaces are again being refilled, not with blue-collar workers but with media agencies, design studios, swanky loft apartments and chic lifestyle hotels.

Most prominent of all of these redeveloped factories is Manufaktura. Occupying a former 19th-century cotton mill, the 2006 launch of this vast retail and leisure complex provided a stabilizing influence on the city’s economy and breathed fresh life into Łódź.

Particularly fetching in the warmer months, it’s during summer that this world-class development comes alive as locals potter past dancing fountain installations and an artificial beach shaded by swooning palms.

As daredevils whizz above on overhead ziplines, one would be forgiven for thinking they were anywhere but Łódź.

Reminders of reality, though, are never far away, and local flavor is provided by the onsite Museum of the Factory, a small but stellar museum that vividly retells the story of the town’s industrial beginnings.

This is but the start of the distractions, for a stone’s throw away lies the Museum of the City of Łódź, a beautiful institution found within a Neo-Baroque palace constructed by Izrael Poznański, a 19th-century textile tycoon of titanic wealth.

It’s worth a visit not just to admire the majestic interiors but for exhibits that include a scale model of interwar Łódź and a galaxy of possessions once belonging to the city’s most famous son—the world-renowned pianist Arthur Rubinstein.

Culturally, Łódź has much to recommend, and its list of glories includes MS2, a striking white cube gallery with a boundary-pushing repertoire, as well as the Museum of Textiles, a place that belies its mundane title to present an immense and Insta-friendly collection of zany fashions and fabrics through the ages.

But there is more: for example, a hands-on science center set inside an ex-power plant and the Orientarium, a new-generation zoo whose standout feature is an underwater glass tunnel circled by stingrays, zebra sharks and Poland’s only bowmouth guitarfishes.

And forget not the city’s associations with film. Often nicknamed Holly-Łódź, the city’s film school has produced talents such as Krzysztof Kieślowski, Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda, and this rich heritage is celebrated inside a Cinematography Museum brimming with bits of old movie sets and technical equipment.

A more poignant experience awaits at the 19th-century Jewish Cemetery; containing up to 230,000 tombs (the exact number is unknown), these include bombastic examples of sepulchral art such as the world’s largest Jewish mausoleum—a domed tomb containing the resting place of Poznański, ‘the King of Cotton.’

It is the cemetery’s forgotten recesses that are the most powerful, however. As the sun slants through the tangled trees, the half-shattered tombs that zigzag through the thick vegetation make for an ethereal sight.

Away from the sanctuary and solitude of the cemetery, the dank, shadowy courtyards in the Bałuty district are a haunting testimony to previous times—here lay the second biggest ghetto of the Nazi Reich, and today the area’s battered tenements cast a melancholic shadow as dusk draws in.

Back in the center, all visits naturally circle around Piotrkowska, an ever-stretching street lined with a handsome mix of Art Nouveau buildings. Beguiling as it is, it is the offshoot streets that warrant the most attention—for instance, ‘Roza’s Passageway,’ a once-forgotten alleyway transformed into a giant mosaic composed of thousands of mirrored shards attached to the walls.

Created by Joanna Rajkowska (best known in Poland for outraging Warsaw after erecting a permanent, artificial 15-meter palm tree in the center of the capital), the mosaic was inspired by the artist’s daughter’s triumph over eye cancer.

Then there are the woonerfs that sprout off Piotrkowska. Based on the Dutch idea of turning streets into ‘living organisms’ where cars, cyclists and pedestrians seamlessly co-exist, woonerfs such as that found on Traugutta Street have become one of the city’s big pulls, sprinkled as they are with outbreaks of public art, independent cafes filled with diligent digital nomads and craft beer bars selling maverick brews to whiskered connoisseurs.

That such diversions often stand within eyeshot of Communist blocks of cosmic size, futuristic office compounds, restored factories, ramshackle tenements and lavish palaces in varying degrees of health all makes for a thrilling architectural buffet.

Taken together, it is this sum of curious odds and ends that combine to give Łódź its strong personality; a place of significant visual, emotional and cultural depth, it has emerged from ruin to become a city of the now—eccentric but engaging and fizzing with energy.