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Racists in the UK! WokForkers pub in London, where the staff monitor everyone for racist comments - if you are white! AI-generated image

Racists in the UK! Tips for Barmaids on How to Do Their Job

A racist-themed evening down at the local

29 July 2026 – Racists in the UK! Tips for Barmaids on How to Do Their Job

The images in this post have been generated using artificial intelligence and are intended for illustrative purposes only. None of the visuals imply any real-world endorsement, affiliation, or association with any specific product, brand, or entity. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), places, or events is purely coincidental.

[Posted in category Mick Hart’s Diary 2026]

In case you haven’t noticed or are a liberal lefty in lefty denial, there is, in the UK today, a severe and palpable sense of racially aggravated unease among the rightful heirs of our British heritage. Failed socially engineered multiculturalism, the daily arrival of ‘boat people’ flooding with open government arms into blighted Britain, high-profile racially motivated vicious crimes where the victim is almost exclusively white, a tension that is tangible and alleged two-tier policing are polarising the political spectrum into those who crave more woke and migrants and those who never asked for either and feel they could do quite well without.

Our esteemed former prime minister, the man who everybody likes to dislike, even by those of his own kind, who, in spite of loss of support, including from those in his own party, refused to take the glaring hint and would not pack his bags and go until he was given the royal arse-boot, was too busy during his time in office posing for cheesy, smarmy photos with Ukraine’s converted comedian, the ubiquitous Mr Zelensky, rather than do what Britons demand and ultimately deserve, which is to tackle the immigrant crisis.

Any hope that the new Labour hopeful, Andrew ‘call me Andy’ Burnham, and his newly elected cabinet (bye-bye, Mr Lammy) will apply themselves to this existential problem is not a hope that we should cling to. As long as the old two past-it parties continue to be voted in by the stuck-in-their-ways, heads-up-their-arses, gormless British electorate, the streets of Britain will grow more dangerous, and our towns and cities will become, as many are already, the unrecognizably menacing places that the prophet Enoch Powell predicted all those years ago.

Meanwhile, as Andy Burnham and his Labour cohorts celebrate accession into the breach, a little-known chain of public houses, once celebrated for common sense, seem bent on repositioning themselves as number one in the woke parade.

Racists in the UK! Tips for Barmaids on How to Do Their Job

A few weeks ago, I ventured out for a pint at my friend’s local WokeForkers. It was that evening on the day of the week when I expected the pub to be quiet, which, indeed, it initially was, little knowing, however, that the latest roster of bar staff (these pubs seem to change their bar staff faster than I can change my underpants – old proverb, every gusset has a suspect lining) had just emerged from company training, from which, and I kid you not, not one of the dunces or dullards had mastered the art of anything, least of all, I warrant, the essential public relations skills which, for as long as hospitality has existed, have always been first and foremost for running a pub successfully.

This, however, was not the least among their greatest disadvantages, although the one begets the other, for they were also of that dismal generation, which, duly processed, packed and prepared by the corporate liberal sausage factory, the British education system, programmes the poor unfortunate wretches for a life of second-class citizenship, making them fat between the ears, ready for the country’s future, which many pundits see as comparable to a slaughterhouse.

I have no idea, do you, where some pubs get their staff from? They seem, by their dour expressions, surly, disinterested ways and chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes, as if, like Zelensky’s army, they have been dragged off from the streets. Whatever it is they teach them at Pub Mismanagement School, devotion to duty isn’t it, neither are the principal tenets required of the hospitality trade, such as amiability, affability, congeniality and conviviality, and above all and most importantly, the indisputable golden rule that customers should at all times be treated with respect – as the customers are those very people who, by putting their money over the bar, pay the barmaids’ wages.

Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that most of the staff are female, and those who aren’t are not much different, for even those whose gender poses difficult questions look and act as though every moment is a hormonal crisis. It only goes to show that in any mismanaged democracy, you need to be extremely careful who you give the vote to, let alone give them leave to stand mardy and daft behind the bar as if the menopause arriving early has turned off the smile along with the taps and all they are waiting to do is call ‘last orders’. Now, don’t call me sexist! Like the WokeForker’s staff who earole everyone, I am merely repeating what I heard someone say at a table whose conversation was personal, private and had nothing to do with me whatsoever. {The opinions in this post are not necessarily those of the person you might think I am.}

On the drinking night in question, the night I had anticipated would be pleasantly quiet, the one thing I had not bargained for was a themed evening revolving around “You can’t say that; it’s racist?”

Tips for Barmaids on How to Do Their Job

Now this particular pub in Wellsford Garden City stands at a junction with Ethnic Street. And one of the reasons I like to drink there is that by sitting next to the windows, you can watch the world, such as it is or as it has sadly become, go by, whilst wishing it would go away. How much nicer it would be to gaze through those same windows and see on the other side of them Britain as it used to be before the migrant invasion (a cluster of wistful, heartfelt sighs!).

“You’re not supposed to say that!”

“I know. It’s a bugger, isn’t it.”

Psychologist, psychiatrist, anthropologist, social historian, time traveller, circus trainer, zookeeper, most emphatically zookeeper, but anyone, in fact, who is seeking a snapshot of UK life can get it from one of these window seats, and once you are over the shock of it  – to do this takes two or three visits – the spectacle unfolding is almost as freakishly entertaining as it is distressing. We’ll say no more of that. Ungird your loins, as most of them do, and go and see for yourselves.

On the evening when my account took place, we had not long taken temporary residence in these very seats, which look out onto the madness at which I have hinted, when, flying around the corner on two wheels, like something out of an ancient Sweeney episode or a cartoon from the 1960s, came a cop car at full tilt.

Something serious must have occurred, but what? Had someone been making mean tweets on his phone? Had an act of terrorism taken place that urgently needed to be hushed up in the interests of ‘race relations’? Was the High Street under siege by a terrifying far-right rally attended by two old grannies; a woman who dared to call herself that; and a moved-from-Rochdale (quickly) choirboy who, whilst not yet supporting Labour, might be trained to do so when he’s given the vote at the age of 13? (Roll up! Roll up! Here exclusively in the UK, Labour’s young performing poodles!) But no, we were wrong on every count. Whatever it was that had kicked off, it was here, among us, at WokeForkers, whose highly intelligent bar staff had gone and called the old bill.

The marauding cop car screamed to a halt, as they so dramatically do in 1940s black-and-white films (careful what you say there!), and seconds later in they marched – two of Britain’s finest: one with a head that was really quite bald and the other wearing his colleague’s toupee, which, dislodged when the driver hit the brakes, had landed on his chin, lending him the appearance of the Wild Man from Borneo, which I suppose must mean he lives in Luton.

Racists in the UK! Police in UK WokeForkers pub march in: one is bald, the other is wearing his colleague's toupee on his chin. AI-generated image
AI-generated image

As we were sitting miles away from the bar (it’s a prudent thing to do, out of earshot of the WokeForkers’ Stasi), we couldn’t at all make out what was going on, but we knew that it must be serious, for why else would the police have been called?

After a full ten minutes in which nothing happened at all, a tall gent, foreign-looking, wearing what looked like a Chinese face and carrying a populist tote bag (it had a Union Jack on its side) marched defiantly, with no police escort, as though he were guilty of nowt, apart from the tartan kilt he was wearing, across the space of the room and disappeared onto the street.

You would have thought that being let off by our more than lenient British policemen (well, I said that he was foreign-looking, or he would have been arrested), the accursed fiend would have counted his blessings and made himself particularly scarce, but this he did not do. No sooner had he exited than he was spotted by one of our party eating apples near the pub’s back door. Eating apples! Near the pub’s back door!!!! His unacceptable presence must have been detected by one of WokeForkers’ ever-vigilant CCTV installations (for if ever a street was in need of a camera, then Ethnic Street is it), as moments later, the dynamic duo – Baldy booby and Beardy bobby – were out there on the street giving the culprit a piece of their minds, which he, the ungrateful recipient, looked as though he neither wanted nor knew what use he could put them to.

At this point in time, we had not the faintest idea what it was that had gone down, so naturally we were all of a mind, “Well done, those boys in blue; it’s best you move him on!” The truth of the matter is, however, that this extremely dangerous man, for what else could he be, tried himself three or four times to move by his own volition, but whenever he made to walk away, the coppers were on him again.

Just as they, as a group, drew level with our viewing window, a female member of the establishment’s bar staff came to collect some empty glasses. Someone in our party asked her what the problem was. I think we were all expecting to hear a sorry tale of attempted murder –  after all, it’s fast becoming a national pastime in Britain – but what we got instead was a sorry something else.

“Oh dear!” went the girl, her attitude and countenance struggling to contain the dreadful trauma she had just experienced. “He [the Chinese man in a kilt] was making racist remarks at the bar … saying things about !*!*… When I argued with him, he brought up the subject of !*!*and {here was the real big hit!} He mentioned Tommy Robinson!” At the uttering of Tommy Robinson’s name, she literally, physically shuddered, and I thought for a moment she would fade away like a latter-day Gothic heroine or crumple into insignificance like tomorrow’s and the next day’s and every edition before and after of that mamby-pamby left-wing pamphlet, now on the web, the Guardinistan.

“But he’s not a white bloke, is he?” one of our party asked, presuming by prescription that no one could be accused of racism unless they were unconditionally white.

We all peered out of the window to test the validity of this assertion: it was hard to tell just what the man was, standing there in his Chinese face, looking all Jock-like in his kilt and feverishly eating apples, but what he expressly wasn’t, or had no reason to look like, was a man that was guilty of anything more than not having chosen his pub too carefully.

“Oh yes, he is a white man,” returned the wilting maiden, in an emphatic tone of voice and a horridly fraught expression that clearly suggested he could be no other.

“But you have to admit that his eyes aren’t British and his complexion is …”

She peeped through the window alongside me: “I suppose he must have a suntan.”

What a lucky chap, I thought; he must have been somewhere nice, somewhere other than WokeForkers, as there certainly was a definite dearth of any sunshine here, or anywhere, for that matter, where sunshine is employed symbolically to reflect a happy cultural climate, the likes of which we no longer have in the Disunited Migrant Kingdom.

If the barmaid had expected a commiserative response from us, she would have been sorely disappointed, since we were all too busy trying to fathom why a racist comment, if indeed there had actually been one, and a verbal reference to Tommy Robinson (I always get his name mixed up with a certain lefty actor) justified the deployed resources and exceedingly precious time of not one but a brace of coppers – and they were not even hobby bobbies! – whose only contribution, from what we were able to discern, was a forty-minute ideological lecture.

At length, and quite a long length at that, the taken-to-task white imposter, for so he seemed to us, made his third or fourth attempt to quietly walk away, only to have himself recalled by yet another officer. Had someone mentioned Tommy again? They had brought in reinforcements!

Racists in the UK!

At this juncture, the harangued man was literally at a junction; he was standing on a traffic island in the middle of the road, and as he reserved his legal right not to return to the beckoning copper, Mr Plod-come-lately, who was rather of that group which included PCs Baldy and Beardy, the most pugnacious of the three, marched across the road to him, where the poor man duly received yet another remonstration.

This peculiar – and rational people might say – preposterous police procedural episode persisted for yet another twenty pointless finger-wagging minutes, with the man, who was no doubt ardently wishing he had gone anywhere else in the world but WokeForkers, standing, in every respect, head and shoulders above his inquisitors and responding to their pontifications in a cool, calm, and collected manner, giving, from what we could see, a lot better than what he was getting, as people do when knowing that by being in the right they have natural testimony on their side, finally, having had enough of it and not having lost his temper, as I suppose this is what the coppers wanted, waved his hands in tired conclusion and strode away in his riding-up kilt, his single man’s sack – full of apples – swinging in the breeze, like a man who had clearly won his argument and was off to a decent pub.

Racists in the UK! A man in a kilt, holding a bag of apples is told off by three police officers.
AI-generated image

The irony of the situation, as irony tends to lurk, don’t you think, around virtually every corner in life, like racist men in kilts armed with bags of apples, was that it wasn’t more than ten minutes after this extraordinary piece of theatre, which, according to our collective opinion, was a complete and utter waste of time, that I trekked off to the bar to replenish our party’s glasses.

The young barmaid behind the bar, who was entirely where you’d expect her to be, with a must-have ring thrust through her snout and her hair all dyed in a laughable colour, asked me what I wanted to drink. So far, so good, so proper, but I couldn’t quite make up my mind. WokeForkers sell mighty fine ales, unmatched, unfortunately, by their bar staff, and often one is spoiled for choice, which is sadly and far too commonly not the case with their bar staff.

It just so happened by a quirk of Time that a middle-aged chap had arrived at the bar contiguous with my own arrival, and with me being in full dither, he was given the option to order his beer ahead of me, but he, like me but for different reasons, was also finding the simple task of placing his order difficult due to the row from the TV set, which was showing a BBC broadcast of a gaggle of noisy migrants celebrating the short bus ride from the shores of Dover to a 5-star hotel.

He apologised to the barmaid for not being able to make himself heard: “I’m sorry,” he said, politely, “but some illegal migrants on the telly are talking rather loud.”

The barmaid immediately froze; her jaw shot down several metres like Frank Zappa’s Billy the Mountain’s; her ridiculous blue hair bristled; her face underwent a monstrous change, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing because it wasn’t particularly pleasant even in its ‘normal’ state, but now it appeared all bent and twisted as though savagely infected by a virulent dose of that plague exclusive to the liberal left called ‘outrage’ or was cast in a mask of tormented virtue like Hope not Hate’s at its most hypocritical.

“What did you say?!” she demanded.

I tried to prevent the middle-aged man from reiterating his previous utterance, for, being an expert on leftist ire, the motivation behind the question was all too plain to see: the harridan behind the bar was gunning for confrontation. But the inoffensive middle-aged chap, believing no ill in what he had said, merely repeated what he had said.

Those of you familiar with Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist will have no difficulty, I am sure, in recalling the manner in which Mr Bumble reacted when Oliver asked for more, and had our rancid barmaid been auditioning for Bumble’s part in the soap-operatic drama that she had taken upon herself to direct, I would recommend her before you could say, ‘Does she not know how to smile?’ but I wouldn’t employ her behind a bar for all the inflatable dinghies in France or all the beer at WokeForkers (OK, well even I can make concessions!)

With her hackles raised, which made her hair look dafter, and inconsolably rigid with outrage, she could hardly muster utterance, but when she retrieved her articulation, she suddenly cried out, “Racist! What you’ve said is racist!” and straightaway she was on it, like a chronic dose of the shits, calling loudly along the bar, “We’ve got a racist here!”

Immediately, in response to her wailing, a beanpole excuse for a man sporting a bun on his head, without an arse in his trousers and masquerading as something that was worth the space he occupied, lickety-splitted fast-like from the opposite end of the bar, where no doubt he had been lying in wait to pounce on the first errant customer (who, for public consumption, had to be white) for making racist remarks.

The female Mr Bumble reported her findings to him, and immediately he went from looking absolutely and totally gormless to adopting a posture of high alert, as if he needed his nappies changing and the only one he could trust with this task was wonderless woman the manager – well, lefties are known for their kinks. Not to dwell on that too much, a second racist in one evening had been unmasked at the WokeForkers’ bar! [Dramatic chords of music!]

The manager, female I think, but then I could be wrong, was on the scene like a butcher’s dog, but the amiable white middle-aged man, who was clearly racist because of this fact if not for any other, knowing what they were at, waved his hand contemptuously and with a rewarding complacent smile casually walked away, leaving his three would-be antagonists, all of whom he had made quite clear he wouldn’t touch with yours, which is to say, your resentment and anger, looking perfectly stupid. And one has to raise the question, could they look anything else?

AI-generated image. Female bar staff at WokeForkers pub shocked by racist remarks"
AI-generated image

Left standing alone as I was, the dangling-in-the-wind manager had no one else, only me, to turn to, so rounding on me, it said, as if I really wanted to know, “Like every responsible pub, we adhere to a zero-tolerance policy.” Should I have been impressed? It sounded lame and weary.

I wanted to say it was a pity that we didn’t have a similar policy to stop the boats from flooding in as well as one to prevent the left from ethnically cleansing the white population and its sovereign culture, but I contented myself by thinking these things and tried to suppress a smirk as I said, with remarkable cheerfulness, “And what an effective policy it is to be sure (crikey, I was close to sounding Irish!), but as all I am trying to do is order a pint of beer, perhaps someone would be so kind as to take my order and serve me.” I almost had to shout to be heard as the illegal migrants on the telly were having such a raucous time here in dear old England that it sent a shiver of pride from the nape of my neck to my balls, er of my feet, and elsewhere throughout my body, or something of that persuasion, to acknowledge that I belonged to such a recklessly tolerant nation.

The immediate panic over, and the alarmist barmaid having returned from wherever she had scuttled off to fortify her troubled self with intakes of air and smelling salts, I promptly ordered my pint.

As she pushed the glass against the tap, it was then that she took her Marxist role just a little too far.

“I suppose you’re racist too?” she rasped.

Woke Watch PC UK!

Woke Watch UK!

Now call me old school or even old-fashioned, but in my long and illustrious career of supporting the British pub, I have had the belief instilled in me that barmaids are there to pull your pint, not to pull your chain.

The answer that I was ready to give was manifold, such as “Has your girlfriend left you? Is it the wrong time of the month? Or don’t you know what gender you are?” But I knew that she was goading me, so the compliant answer given was, “Yes, of course I am; I’m a white English male; how could I be anything else but racist? ” But then I went on to correct her, saying that I am not a racist; I am a realist, and that, whilst the words have a similar ring to them, there’s a world of difference between the two, and it is only the left who confuse them because it suits their divisive agenda.

Having failed to elicit the response that she was so keenly after and not knowing what further to do to advance her cunning plan, from then on she shut her trap and did what she was paid to do – poured the pint and took the money.

Racists in the UK! Tips for Barmaids on How to Do Their Job

Now, you may be thinking, and rightly so, that all that I have related is a silly storm in a teacup, and in this you would be right; in itself, it is. But when you collate these issues — a ‘zero tolerance policy’, which works like a one-way street; an almost hysterical urge by giddy-headed girly staff to adopt the role of brain police rather than confine themselves to what they are paid to do, ie take your order and pull your pint; the praises sung of ethnic enrichment, in tones of a drugged-up parrot, when nothing could be further and more nauseatingly far from the truth; and the programmed decrying of racism aimed at native Britons living quietly in their own country, because it is their country and because it is their heritage, and they would like to keep it that way – when all these factors are added together, rollocks! A piece of general advice would be that people that work in pubs should do the job they are paid to do and never stick their oar in. Comprehendi lefties?

Should, dear reader, in spite of the evidence that I have laid before you, an element of doubt yet persist, then ask yourself the following: Did an alleged racist comment by a man in a kilt with a bag of apples standing at WokeForkers’ bar warrant the intervention of not one, not two but three police officers? Did the chap who stood at the bar and wryly referred to the noisy migrants deserve the reaction he received from the neurotically troubled barmaid? And wasn’t it, don’t you think, just a little bit on the impudent side, not to mention provocative, when the lowly underpaid serving wench overstepped her mark by calling me out as racist (not that he gives a f*ck, shouts an inconsiderate heckler) when all I had said and done was order a pint of beer?

A week or so in the aftermath of that evening of entertainment, how dire the weather was for June inserted itself, as weather does in English conversations, during a chat between yours truly and a stranger in a pub, which was not, I hasten to add, WokeForkers’, for you have to be careful, very careful what you say in there!

“Considering how vile the weather has been of late,” said I, “the UK has to be the last country on earth where you’d want to be faced with extortionate fees for gas and electric heating.”

Quickly the man addressed replied that these are not the only things that are wrong with this country today, and discovering from that moment forward that we were mutual travellers not only in kind but also in destination, off we went down the bumpy road on route to collapsing Britain, stopping off on the way at the cultural climate of fear engendered by accusations of racism and what it did for a man called Nowak; the knife-wielding migrant butcher prowling the streets of Belfast; the ethnic-obsessed two-tier cop shop; tragic Southport; indefensible Rochdale; and the saddo younger generation, whom our pied piper politicians are leading up the garden path and tossing over Culture Loss Cliff. We also took a detour to reflect upon the situation of an authoritarian incumbent PM, whom, no matter how many want him out, simply won’t F Off!* Naturally, when we had gotten to where we knew our journey would take us, which was around and around and around in circles, I apprised my fellow traveller about the ‘spot the racist night’, hosted by Wellford’s WokeForkers.

“Civil war,” is coming, he said, solemnly shaking his head. “Everyone you talk to is thinking and saying the same.”

One cannot deny the uneasy feeling that the hands on the doomsday clock identified by Elon Musk are moving inexorably closer to that retributive midnight hour.

Close the curtains, bolt the doors and turn the television on for a counter-intuitive narrative, if that’s the only defence you have against what is lurking out there on the streets, but confront, do not avoid, those disturbing images of the migrant boats as they keep flooding in, and if anyone calls you racist when you speak your mind, remember what terrors silence will bring and wear your antagonists’ failed agenda as you would wear a badge of honour.

How will it all end, you ask? “Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

* He’s gone, and the panacea replacing him is ‘Nice to see me being nice’, good old Andy Burnham. What are you going to do about violence on the streets, Andy, the steamrolling immigration problem, and the boats flooding into Dover? Are we ever going to get a PM who is brave enough to grow a pair and save us from extinction, or are our PMs and our much-maligned country forever doomed to be controlled by pseudo-liberal globalists?

PS: If you are planning on getting stabbed in the not-too-distant future, you could do a lot worse and be a lot more stupid by doing it in Manchester, since ‘news just in’ informs us that in selected parts of the city, wall-mounted ‘bleed kits’ are being installed. How reassuring is that! Who needs law and order when you’ve got a political plaster?

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, knocking at the moonlit door’

‘No!’ was the answer from Number 10. At least no one here who will or dares to give you the answer you’re looking for.

🎶🎶Things aint what they used to be 🎶🎶

Vote Green for Migrant Detention Centres Near You! – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Life in the UK – it’s all so peculiar – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Mick Hart with Victor Ryabinin Artist on Otradnoye beach in the Kaliningrad region, January 2005.

Victor Ryabinin Artist: a man who continues to inspire

A scene from Otradnoye beach, January 2005

18 July 2026 – Victor Ryabinin Artist: a man who continues to inspire

This post’s feature photograph rates as one of my favourites from the album devoted to Victor Ryabinin, a friend and Kaliningrad artist who died on the 18th of July 2019.

It holds a special place in my memory, for in a brief snapshot, a split second in time, it captures one of Victor’s most endearing character traits, that admirable part of his personality which demonstrates his ability to play down adversity and take everything in his stride.

Victor Ryabinin Artist: a man who continues to inspire

Staying with my recent focus on the small, Baltic coastal resort of Otradnoye, the aforementioned photograph was taken on Otradnoye Beach in January 2005, following an unseasonably wet November and December.

The high earthen banks skirting Otradnoye beach had, after two months of nigh-incessant rain, sunk sponge-like into themselves, and the underlying soil erosion, together with high winds, had, by the dual action of undermining and invisible climatic battering, caused the banks to slip and the trees to break and splinter. In the worst scenario, entire trees had been brought out by their roots, and those not already strewn across the beach were stumbling like a drunken orgy to join the ones that had.

Victor Ryabinin Artist: a man who continues to inspire

Somehow, our gallant little group, consisting of Victor, Olga, Olga’s son Daniel, myself and an English friend called Barry, had descended to the beach by way of the crumbling banks. Our walk from Svetlogorsk had been a dicey one, rain-soaked and windswept, alleviated only by a planned excursion to Brachert House Museum. Now, standing on the beach, ready to take that iconic picture, although the wind had dropped a little, the rain was with us again.

Whilst I huddled up in my totally inappropriate London city overcoat, which, being made of pure new wool, would, by the end of the day, thanks to the teeming rain, be twice as heavy as when I had taken it from the wardrobe, Victor, demonstrating typical nonchalance, lowered his umbrella. And that’s the spirit in which I knew him and also how I remember him. For all I know, he may have been privately carrying all the cares in the world on his shoulders, but if such had been the case, he certainly never showed it.

It is true his symbolist art betrayed a tormented sensibility. It had been with him since his childhood and was the driving force behind his work. Victor sometimes hinted that he was locked within an eternal struggle, with haunting apparitions of the ruins in which he had been born and the echo of the city’s suffering ringing in his ears. Growing up in this traumatised environment, his gentle disposition and vulnerable romanticism experienced at first-hand the slow, grinding metamorphosis from scarred and bombed-out shell to modern-thriving urban centre, but the world beyond which shaped his city never left his heart.

I sometimes felt this pain and made it mine, but for me it was but a fleeting impression, not something forged across a lifetime. I could drop the catch, whilst he could not, or give it back whenever I chose, or so I erroneously told myself, whereas for him his only escape, albeit one which spiralled inwards, was through consultation with his muse and by working daily through his recollections on the level of social history. However, if this had been his mortal lot, he rarely ever showed it. To us, he was always and forever a pennies-from-heaven man, holding aloft his open umbrella, a twinkle in his philosophical eye and a smile upon his kindly face, skipping over the Kaliningrad potholes and singing in the rain.

There is music in his memory, and I am privileged that it comes back to me almost every single day.

Victor Ryabinin: 17 December 1946-18 July 2019

^Why is that man carrying that dog? That’s a good question. Because he was convinced that it was a stray. So, he carried it for a mile or more along a narrow and winding seawall, and when he put it down, the ‘rescued’ dog trotted calmly away up and over the bank and presumably went home.

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

A grid-based rectangular picture collage of flowers, gardenfoliage, a boat and Olg Hart with arms outstretched celebrating Kaliningrad weather in summer. There's also there cat, Ginger, peeping from behind a vased flower on the table.

Kaliningrad Weather? – A What You Need to Know Post!

Summery Scenes in Kaliningrad and its region 2024-2025

26 June 2026 – Kaliningrad weather? – A What You Need to Know Post!

Brr, that’s all I can say. That was a quick post, wasn’t it? My allusion, as distinct from illusion – that’s one of those that everyone who voted for Starmer has since become acquainted with and will no doubt once again with the installation of Andy Burnham; oh, how fools are easily fooled – is to my last post (It’s sounding over Britain!), the one in which I appear to ratify the collective delusion (delusion this time) that it always snows in Russia, which it most certainly does in a good many Frederick Forsyth and Len Deighton novels and in most mainstream spy films based upon their books. It even snowed in the pop video used to promote Elton John’s Nikita. I almost said Akido, but I’ve practised that enough (ooh, my aching joints!), and very nearly Akita, but that’s my brother’s dog, neither of which, as I recall, are remotely connected to snow. Do you remember Peter Snow and his infamous ‘swingometer’, replaced today by Sky News’ military analyst Michael Clarke, who is a hybrid of Peter Snow and a friend of mine called Greg? Sorry, it’s all getting so confusing. That’s flux for you.

In order to demonstrate, therefore, that it always snows in Russia, but it doesn’t, well, not here in Kaliningrad at any rate, I’ve whipped out the old photo album and borrowed from myself some lovely, summery, sunny pictures that rather prove my point.

Kaliningrad Weather? – A What You Need to Know Post!

My previous post was built around snowy scenes in Polessk, so I thought it only fair in order to dispel notions that it always snows in Polessk that I contrast those images with their summer counterparts. These photographs show the Deyma River and Polessk Canal, together with the landmark Eagle Bridge. The sun is shining, the snow has gone, the ice has melted, and the boats are out.

Here am I, sitting outside Königsberg’s Rossgarten Gate, outside the Rossgarten Gate restaurant. It’s not that they wouldn’t let me in, but the restaurant’s name, Solnechny Kamen, which, as you students of Russian know full well, translates to ‘Sun Stone’, subliminally inspired me to capture the first rays of summer, which were breaking prematurely over the city in the last month of May 2024. Incidentally, I’ve not gone mardy and am not refusing to eat my food because, instead of a pint, I’ve been given a cup of coffee; I’m just thawing out after a long, hard winter.

Summer in Kaliningrad and its region is not all about beer and sun lounging – more’s the pity. On the contrary, it’s a time to get things done! Do those knee pads suit me? I’m doing a real conquistador job on upcycling that old open-arm bench, and our good friend, artist and conservationist, and, quite frequently, Immanuel Kant, is treating our historic Soviet statue to a summer makeover.

When the sun’s out, you want to be outside with it, but as my friend’s father, Mr Wilcox, used to bawl at me whenever I was ‘holidaying’ at his farm in my youth, “We’re fighting a war against human nature, Hart!! There’s work to do!!” And you couldn’t say fairer than that, because you daren’t. As his ghostly voice echoes across the decades, I assuage his wrath by turning my hand to a little shabby chicing in the country house hallway. Alright, alright, I admit most of the ideas were Olga’s.

And when the work is done … (most of these ideas are mine.)

Celebrating summer’s divine attributes.

Am I responding to the dulcet tones of my authoritarian guardian Mr Wilcox, or is it just excellent weather to be doing it? All my own work? Leave it out!

And when the work is done … it’s time for a libation with the neighbours.

Table near a doorway with two lit lanterns, a vase of red and orange roses, a ceramic owl mug, and a glass of tea on a wooden table; garden in the background.

Going German bunkers on a hot day in Kaliningrad. Meanwhile, Ginger teaches himself how to hide behind a flower before venturing out onto the terrace to assess how invisible he has become.

Late summer: the last rays of sunlight falter over the Curonian Lagoon.

Olga Hart is sitting on a multipatterned boho cushion in the garden on the lawn with plates of food in front of her on a green tablecloth and a bucket of bright-coloured flowers. to her right.

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Olga Hart in a coat standing on a rock on the ice-covered Caronian Lagoon at sunset c. March 2026.

Polessk in Winter is Rather More Than a Frosty Atmosphere

And you can’t argue with that, can you!

18 June 2026 – Polessk in Winter is Rather More Than a Frosty Atmosphere

Do you know there’s a rather rude English expression that goes, ‘I don’t want to piss on your fireworks’, wryly meaning ‘I don’t want to spoil it for you’, which, being a gentleman, I would never use, particularly as the opening line for a blog post, in the same way that I would never say, in the first month of summer, that in ‘less than six months’ time it will be Christmas’; for who, after a long, drawn-out, bitterly cold and exhausting winter, such as the one Nature treated us to in Kaliningrad this year, would want to be reminded at this escapist juncture of the unravelling seasons of the cold, ice and snow, from which it seems we have only just emerged, when we are yearning, body, mind and soul, for sun, warmth and pretty women wearing summer dresses?

You might well consider it perverse, therefore, that in the midst of my understanding almost all I profess to understand, I go ahead willy-nilly in the contradictory manner of a British politician doing exactly the opposite of what he promised before he was elected, but, as it is with politicians, memory rarely recognises the virtue of fidelity, so that being unfaithful to one season whilst embracing quite another suggests an equal portion of love for those devoutly courted in the past and for those with whom contentment brightens life at present, permitting you to pick and choose as and when and how you choose with self-proclaimed impunity.

Thus it is, without further, if any, considered apology, unless to make allowances for the damp condition in which you find your fireworks, that a perverse pleasure falls to me to introduce to you an unseasonal series of photographs that recollect a winter’s day in and around Polessk, a Kaliningrad regional town, which, long ago in German times, was known by the name of Labiau, with one or two appended photos taken somewhere else but on that same petrified day and not so dreadfully far away as to make my inclusion of them beyond the remit of my title.

Polessk and thereabouts

On the Polessk Canal Road to Matrosovo
WWI/WWII German Gun Emplacement Polessk Kaliningrad
Restoring the Polessk Brewery in the Kaliningrad Region
The Natural Beauty of the Baltic Coast Kaliningrad
Support the Restoration of Zalivinio Lighthouse Kaliningrad

Polessk in Winter

Polessk, ice-bound river and canal (4 March 2026)

Russian gent in a brown coat walking on the frozen surface of the Deyma River carrying two bags.
Russian chap ice-fishing seated on the intersection between the Deyma River and Polessk Canal witha row of colourful boat houses along the shore in the background.
Frozen Deyma River in Polessk, Russia, with tire tracks on the ice, reeds along the banks, clear blue sky, distant people sitting on the ice far ahead.

Eagle Bridge

Mick Hart in a black jacket and knit hat leaning on the red railing of Eagle Bridge, Polessk, beside a heavily frozen river.

Curonian Lagoon, Frozen

Olga Hart in a red hat stands on large rocks along a snow-covered and frozen Curonian Lagoon at sunset.
Is it Batman? No, It’s Olga Hart standing on a bolder in the frozen Curonian Lagoon silhouetted against a huge surreal twilight sun.

On your bike! It’s the Phantom Cyclist!

Life-size scarecrow figure with a pale mask and red helmet, holding a bicycle wheel, standing in a yard by a metal fence in Zalivino, Russia.

The Ponart Brewery Beer Shop

Entrance to Polessk Ponart Beer shop. A black sign in white lettering above a glass display window and white door; tiled steps and metal railings.
Shop sign with large white stylised lettering on a black background above a glass door. The sign includes the word 'Ponarth' and a year '2015' on the left. It is the Polessk Ponart beer shop.
Corner store on a grey, three-storey building with a blue awning, along a brick sidewalk and quiet street. Two satellite dishes are mounted on the side of the building.

👉👉👉👉👉👉👉Ponart Brewery in the Strange Case of Creation

Mick Hart in a black jacket and knit hat stands at a bar, holding a bottle of drink, his nuts in front of him; chalkboard menus glow in the background.

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Otradoye, Georgenswalde, Water Tower, red-brick Gothic

Water Tower Otradnoye (Georgenswalde) is outstanding

A water tower cast in the image of a Gothic castle

11 June 2026 – Water Tower Otradnoye (Georgenswalde) is outstanding

Among the Kaliningrad region’s many examples of red-brick Gothic architecture, water towers are an interesting group. Towers in a broader architectural context are one of Gothic’s principal aesthetics. It is these that best achieve the soaring vertical and steep perpendicularity by which structures in this genre, be they standalone or an integral part of more complex compositions, are canonically determined.

The Kaliningrad region’s water towers, whilst sharing design characteristics of a fundamental nature, are, when considered on a one-to-one basis, by no means indistinct.

Each tower is engendered with structural and stylistic traits that lift them out of rigid conformity.

Water Tower Otradnoye (Georgenswalde): a functional folly

K. Fischer’s Otradnoye (formerly Georgenswalde) tower is of a standard rectangular tapering build, with a four-section, snow-arresting flanged-metal triangular roof. Elevated to a height of approximately 147 feet, the mediaeval replica exhibits typical red-brick Gothic elements but with distinct and personalised variants, such as, in its mid-section, lancet-inspired indentations which, although they are tall and narrow, are capped with rounded ends and used to produce a sunken frame in which to display conforming windows arranged in a vertical sequence. Other arrangements of note include a recessed crenellated frieze, a triangular pediment with matching corner buttresses, cement-rendered horizontal bands which divide the building into vertical sections, blind niches of different dimensions, and deep, stepped-back door alcoves typically arched but wide in form.

As with many civic buildings of this type and of this period, the overall exotic impression borrows for its impact from romanticised notions of picturesque castles, bold and grand in stature, whilst concealing behind its fortified mask a utilitarian purpose which, at the time of its inauguration, was rarely excelled in practicality and, in contradiction to its appearance, more modern and useful in application.

K. Fischer’s Georgenswalde tower is a prominent local landmark in the Soviet-renamed coastal town Otradnoye. Its historical and architectural value is reflected in its official status as a protected cultural heritage monument.

👉👉👉👉 Villa Gretchen in Otradnoye
👉👉👉👉 Otradnoye, Kaliningrad: a little gem on the Baltic Coast

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Life in the UK - It's all so peculiar. The map of the UK on its head.

Life in the UK – it’s all so peculiar

The topsy-turvy world of life in the UK

From the dress code and behaviour of Britain’s young ‘ladies’ to the conflict in the Muddle East, post-civilised Britain is a mass of contradictions.

30 April 2026 – Life in the UK – it’s all so peculiar

[This post appears in the ‘Meanwhile in the UK‘ category]

As sanguine and sagacious as you are, you would not, I am perfectly sure, have jumped to the conclusion that our esteemed Headmaster, Sir Keir Starmer, had completely dropped his marbles when he allowed the loony left, a motley ragbag of Labour MPs, cabbage-looking Greens and limp-wristed Liberal Democrats, to railroad him into disallowing UK airbases to be used for the deployment of US aircraft required for service in the Middle East. If Sir K knows nothing else, he sure does know his onions when it comes to choosing strategically between the preservation of the centuries-old US ‘special relationship’ and running the risk of riots, which, had he not capitulated, the anarchistic left and its unholy migrant confederates would have no doubt unleashed upon Britain’s lawless streets.

Rampant riots on Britain’s streets, with their concomitant rape of the already endangered public purse, cost a third-world ransom and are, moreover, when televised for all the world to see, an embarrassing indictment of failed political leadership unless brought swiftly under control with the sort of robust measures that Britain never employs; the only exception being when those that protest are white, whereupon rest assured that every last man jack of them, as distinct from last man Ali, irrespective of sex or age, can expect their impudence to be met with the ‘full force of the law’. Another downside to be had from riots is that they are bad for happy endings as written at the ballot box; indeed, they incur the unfortunate consequence of lingering in the collective memory and then later, in wild abandon, leaping out in the voting booths as ‘Xs’ in rival MPs’ boxes.

Palestine What a State! By the UK in a State!
Brits told Be Vigilant as boats sail in on tide of terror

Bearing this conjunctively in mind with the volatile state of Britain and the clear and present danger of nationwide civil unrest, even the most vehement of Starmer opponents would probably have to agree that in refusing ‘bad-ass’ Trump’s request for U.S. planes to land on British concrete was the better part of valour, as also was, it might be opined, his subsequent refusal to send one of His Majesty’s rowing boats to assist with the tricky political task of de-mining the Hormuz Straits.

Now, the less charitable among you, ie those who refuse to read The Guardian on the grounds that it might incriminate their reputation and common sense, might be inclined to paraphrase my diplomatic articulation in preference for words less minced and state with convincing clarity that the Starmer way on this occasion, and indeed on many others, had less to do with standing up to Trump than it had with appeasing the migrant masses of whom he is, to borrow freely from Northamptonshire’s vernacular, most possibly rather ‘frit’, although we should ameliorate by admitting not without reason. But then what can one expect if one continues to fill the country day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and forever until it’s goodbye to us with hordes of people who just don’t fit and from countries wherein is found Britain’s most implacable enemies? I wonder how much room there is behind the settee at Number 10 and if nationally it is large enough to accommodate us all when Elon Musk’s prediction of something akin to a civil war kicks off across our imperilled nation from ‘Hoots mon’ to Cornish pasties.

Elon Musk Violence Speech Hits a Raw Liberal Nerve

Much is made in parliament and in the eager-beaver media about the looming threat from historic adversaries, Viking-like would-be aggressors romping in from abroad (you notice I mention no names). There is so much bandied hype about a conventional country-on-country attack upon our sceptred isle, which, although it is not impossible, remains, at least for the moment on the bright side of improbable – let us take as our chosen analogy that it is not entirely impossible that one day ousted Prince Harry might actually wake up and also grow up, but that there is nothing so far in his behaviour to suggest that this possibility will ever transcend improbability.

Nursery rhyme heard from an open window of the Primary School for Blatant Publicity…

Prince Harry went to Ukraine
He isn’t a prince just an exported shame
And after he came home again
(Although he hasn’t got one.)
Nothing was changed; all was the same
The news of him of which we are sick
Make him, for the many, look like a dick.

Perhaps he should change his name to Prince Richard Head.

Life in the UK – it’s all so peculiar

Like the many that preceded them since the end of World War II, this Labour government, which you went and elected – alack a day and fie! – has no plans, no strategy and no backbone, absolutely no political will and, one keenly suspects, no real executive power to halt the migrant invasion from France or to send the buggers already here back to whence they came. As Elon Musk’s, we must conclude, credible prediction, that civil war is on its way takes root in the nation’s consciousness, all that the present government does is continue, as the Tories did before them, to apply to the vicious gaping wound the ointment of capitulation and the accommodating sticking plaster whilst casually sticking two fingers up at the concerns and ultimate welfare of the indigenous population.

Reform Mass Deportation Bill is the Way to Save UK

The normalisation of policies that contradict, confound and confuse the actions expected of government in pursuit, one would ardently hope, of an outcome that favours the country’s health in all its myriad forms – and these not by a long chalk from Starmer’s lacklustre lot alone but as a legacy laid down by a series of not-fit-for-purpose governments stretching back to the end of the Second World War – is red-carpeting the migrant march to the accommodation tune of a tidy eight million pounds a day, costing the British nation dearly, not only in misspent ackers but in the loss of the cultural sense of who we are, the bewilderment of what we are becoming and the fear of what will become of us. as personal and national security are compromised like never before.

Brits told Be Vigilant as boats sail in on tide of terror

Eight million pounds a day is an awful lot of money – an awful lot to spend on people whom we neither need nor want and could very well do without.Think of all the positive things that could be done with all that money. Think of the potholes in Britain’s roads that long to be repaired, of homeless Britons on British streets deserving a roof over their heads, of a most inadequate military, underfunded and demoralised; of new hospitals, new schools, funding for the NHS, real investment in real renewable energy (if you feel that you must think of this) and a thousand other etceteras, etceteras, along with so-ons and so-forth.

The British media is a spilt piss pot, an overflow of alarm stories bent on dunking us into the slops of the country’s parlous economy, rancid with predictions of an economic slowdown and a terminally stagnating GDP. And yet, with all this talk of the United Kidthem heading for the skids and becoming ever more potless, hardly a mention is made, you could say not surprisingly, of the exorbitant and unholy drain on the country’s faltering economy by the perpetual and perpetuated infinite migrant invasion. Bookmark how much it costs to house these delightful darlings: it’s £8,000,000 a day*! And this expenditure in a country where many of its inhabitants cannot afford, in the depths of winter, to switch the domestic heating on. Let me repeat that figure again for the liberal hard-of-hearing: £8,000,000 a day! (*These figures are taken from an assessment made in 2023, which equate to a total annual cost exceeding £3 billion.)

Vote Green for Migrant Detention Centres Near You! – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is

The rocketing cost of home energy bills
Over the past five years, the annual surge in costs of domestic gas and electric bills has been successively and neatly blamed on a jamboree of circumstances ranging from coronavirus to Ukraine and now the war with Iran. I, personally, am glad about this because I have long distrusted my suspicions that the energy crisis is all to do with greed and that everything used to talk it up is nothing but excuses. The sticking point for me is that as each and every crisis that forms the basis for the hikes subsides or, as in the case of coronavirus, vanishes overnight, the higher cost of energy never returns to what it was before the crisis was invented.

Soaring home utility bills in the UK

There are among our energy companies, who seem to be raking-it-in, some who seek to explain away these sudden precipitous peaks by recourse to pious allusions to the investment they are making in the nicely named renewable energy, but I think we all know by now, or if we don’t, we certainly should, that the imposition of net zero, paying 30 pence at the supermarket whenever we need a shopping bag, and all those other touchy-feely save-the-planet schemes are hand-in-glove with another suspect cause, the humanitarian industry, that global ideological racket belying the altruistic motives of philanthropic billionaires (so-called), hidden-agenda NGOs and need-to-be-scrutinised charities. We’ll just stop short of coining the phrase ‘ideological gangsterism’.

Mass building projects, new towns, associated infrastructure and net zero defined

If you want to know what topsy-turvy means in its relationship to net zero and all the other save-the-planet rackets, just head off into Cambridgeshire and take a look at Peterborough – a sprawling conurbation of the most utterly reprehensible kind.

The same urban sprawl is possibly being masterminded for the rural area of North Bedfordshire. South Bedfordshire has already become a save-the-planet farce: a rotten, unsightly mess of sprawling Lego-type house developments and noisy traffic-spewed roads that crisscross and run in fume-ridden, thundering parallel across a blighted and shattered landscape. This kind of urbanised vandalism is a thin-end-of-the-wedge scenario that is about to be driven like a stake through the heart of North Bedfordshire’s slumbering countryside.

Already, thousands of wonderful new homes are poised to be built on the outskirts of Sharnbrook next to the A6, turning a small, grey stone village with centuries of rural history into yet another example of the corrosive link between profit motive, white flight and overpopulation.

New housing estate at Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire: more cars; more houses; more pollution. This is not saving the planet.
A fleet of ‘War of the ‘World’-type excavators are already tearing up rural Bedfordshire.

The A6, which at the best of times is already overburdened with heavy traffic, will, thanks to those lovely new homes and the masses due to occupy them, fall foul to a glutting influx of cars, the majority of which, with one or two exceptions in the shape of those funny whining things powered by electric that most of us don’t understand and more significantly cannot afford, will soon be belching CO₂ in ever-increasing volumes across the choking, stricken landscape. As the victim’s health deteriorates, a frustrating and clogged A-Sick will compel the rabbits in the new-build hutches, for which they have paid most handsomely, to seek out alternative roads on which to boldly go to get them into Bedford and beyond. Towards this competitive end, they will be rat-running their daily way through every local country lane in droves, forever in search of the Golden Fleece, the illusory traffic-free thoroughfare.

This same area of North Bedfordshire is also earmarked as the unlucky recipient of acre upon acre of environmentally unfriendly, ugly, intrusive solar panels; so many of them, in fact, that they will literally gobble up not only some of the county’s best and richest arable land but also turn what is today a truly beautiful example of English countryside at its most precious into a hideous plastic eyesore. Once the topsoil has been removed from century-old fields and meadows, it won’t be long before the relatively useless solar panels are pronounced dead and buried, like the arable land they’ve deprived us of, whereupon, hey presto, like a magician’s rabbit pulled out of a hat, all that sacrificed verdant land will turn, by a smoke-and-mirrors strategy, into a massive brownfield site, and before we can shed a validatory tear, up will sprout thousands of houses where wheat and barley used to be, like an overnight rash of toadstools.

Stop East Park Energy sign. Rural Bedfordshire threatened by acres of lost arable land to solar panels.

This scheme, and the scheming behind it, though it may look topsy-turvy to some, discounting, of course, the duped disciples of the environmental racket, is as plain as the nose on Pinocchio’s face.It could literally pave the way for those hundreds of thousands more houses which Labour so rejoices in, transfiguring, in this case, a magnificent part of rural Bedfordshire, as so many shires are being disfigured, into that deadly urban sprawl that once was the noted cathedral city of Peterborough.

Standing on the crest of the valley overlooking tranquil Bedfordshire, the question might enter your head, ‘Why would they want to bury such splendiferous natural beauty under piles of bricks and slabs of concrete?’ And the answer might come back to you, quietly but convincingly, carried on the melodious sweetness of freely given bird song and suggested to you in the whispering breeze, ‘To pave the way for white flight, as the UK’s major towns and cities devolve to third-world ghettos, the rich therein behind gated compounds and murder incorporated out on the streets. Is this England I’m describing or am I confusing it with South Africa? Perhaps, as E.A. Poe would say, ‘It’s all but a dream within a dream.’ Meanwhile, at the carnival, you pay your money and you make your choice!

Crime matters

Yonder, about 12 months hence (my, but doesn’t time fly – ay up, think of the planet. I wonder how many of them do when they are up there in the sky), I was standing at the checkout in Bedford’s wonderful Wilko’s when a skanky individual – there are a lot of them about – looking like one of Kenneth Grahame’s weasels, went strolling out of the shop, his arms laden with unpaid items. Like the conscientious citizen that I am, and also to test what I had been told, I drew the attention of a store attendant to the undeniable fact that Wilko’s had just been robbed. Rolling his eyes up to the ceiling in a manner that suggested he would rather I had kept this to myself, he nevertheless pursued the thief and came back on this occasion with full retrieval of the loot. As for the robber, he went scot-free.

The new deal in the UK is that shop assistants and shop security can watch but cannot touch: shoplifting in effect has become a kind of spectator sport or retail-sanctioned voyeurism. Shop staff and security are corporately disempowered from apprehending shoplifters for fear the company may be prosecuted for violating the criminal’s human rights. Moreover, the unverified story goes that should you ring the Old Bill and report the crime of shoplifting, you’d simply be wasting your time as well as the cost of a phone call, as they, the UK police, rarely, if ever, respond to such incidents, unveiling the reason, at a guess, why Britain is currently overwhelmed by a shoplifting epidemic and suggesting to the intelligent that this in part explains why good-old Wilko’s Bedford branch closed down.

Female shoplifter. Shoplifting is rife in the UK

Understandably, as a customer, the daily scourge of shoplifting may not be as high on your list of concerns as it would be if you owned a shop, but crime in all its variations, particularly crime to the person and serious crime at that, has reached an all-time UK high, suspiciously coinciding with profound cultural changes in the nation’s composition, with disproportional representation in certain ethnic groups and by conflicting, hostile creeds.

To be chatful of it, you could say that crime in Britain is ‘rife’, and yet it’s a funny thing, I’ll have you know, and you may think so also, how Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, known as the FCO, is altogether exceptionally good at passing judgement on other countries, warning us not to go there for fear of falling victim to crime at street and also state level, but never tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in fact any truth it would seem at all, about the dangers of visiting and living in Britain, especially when that living and visiting pertains to the city of London, which as every honest fellow knows, grows more dangerous every day.

Golders Green Terrorist Attack [April 2026]
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/london-golders-green-stabbing-essa-suleiman-attack-terror-jewish-latest-update-b2968192.html

“Home Secretary says likelihood of an attack in the UK is ‘extremely likely”

It is always ‘extremely likely’ and will always be extremely likely, as ‘we’ve ’let them in and ‘we’ keep on letting them in.

“Suleiman is a British national born in Somalia who had a “history of serious violence and mental health issues”, police say.

So, what’s he doing here? They all seem to have ‘mental health issues’, don’t they?

Mr Prime Minister, Sir, and the rest of the British Establishment, why do you keep on letting them in?

If they weren’t here, they couldn’t be doing what they do, could they?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c3ve2nr60xzt?post=asset%3A81999a10-ec0a-436c-ad97-47ff489f3aaf#post

‘Edith Binstock has lived in Golders Green for more than 70 years and says when she was young it “was the most amazing place to live in”.’

‘” I don’t know how it’s got to such a state… I don’t know when it’s going to get better. I doubt it.”’

I hope the left are listening …

In daylight, UK towns and cities look exactly what they are, but when night descends on Gotham, it’s best to scurry home, and once inside what used to be but isn’t any longer the revered and impregnable Englishman’s castle, quickly bolt and bar the doors. The real, fictional Gotham City had one distinct advantage: when the dregs seeped upwards to the surface, it could always call on Batman, whereas in Britain we think ourselves lucky if we see a copper from one week to the next, and when we do catch a glimpse of them, they are roaring rapidly past in their cars. What the eye don’t see, the report don’t mention.

But whilst visible policing may be a thing of the past and there’s no solution to crime, two things that we do have are a glut of fatuous politicians and a disingenuous media making blatant false assurances that there is no such thing as ‘no-go areas’ in our major cities. Of this they may be right. Take Londinstan, for example: here you can go wherever you like, just don’t expect to always come back, or always come back in one piece.

Where’s that policeman when you need one?

Crime surging in the UK in 2026

Life in the UK – it’s all so peculiar

No write-up on the topsy-turvy fragile state of Britain would be worth its weight in Asian barber shops without a word or several on the behaviour of Britain’s yoof, and in this respect I will not disappoint.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the ‘pleasure’ of spending an evening in a large Bedford pub, which shall here remain unnamed, although I know that my secret will not stop you guessing which one it is I am talking about.

The night it was a Saturday, and yoof were out in force.

This particular boozer, which is renowned for beer that is sensibly priced and grub that is affordable, acts on Friday and Saturday evenings as a meeting place and springboard from which, following an alcohol primer or seven and having strutted their stuff – their very noisy and raucous stuff – the country’s dubious future spills out of the frenzied pub onto Bedford’s bedighted streets like a carnival of zombies. The next stop for Hysteria isn’t exactly the Twilight Zone, but it’s as near as damn it is to swearing. They are heading off, one and all, and in all sorts of bold undress, to abandonedly disport themselves at one or other of Bedford town’s overpriced and over-rated cattle markets, which some, those we must assume deprived of the good fortune to have ever been, or have ever been taken, to anywhere half decent, like to refer to as nightclubs.

Mythological female creature, possibly a feminist
Does my arse look big in this mermaid costume

In observing this unruly and indescribable disembarkation, I asked myself the searching question, has anything really changed since the 1990s? The decade that tried to redefine woman.

Sporting hilarious bouffant hairstyles, massively square and padded shoulders and parroting to anyone awake enough to listen that their careers were all they lived for – even having children was a bind! But occasionally, if it had to happen, they would take time off to do it, providing they were back in the boardroom at 9am the following day – these larger-than-daft career women symbolised the prototype model for the upwardly shafted female; she who had been deliberately conned into giving up her home life for sitting in an office. Led to believe herself empowered, all she had really achieved was emancipation from common sense. Now she would face the grim task of juggling home and working life, while creating feral latchkey kids, stressing it out wage-slave fashion and giving it all to the taxman.

It was during this time, or shortly after, that perfectly innocent programmes, like the comedy On the Buses and the long-running Benny Hill Show, came under the feminist cosh. Indeed, poor old saucy Benny, after years of treating us and our fathers to a feast of tits and bums, was driven out of business by the ‘It’s far too sexist!’ Stasi.

New Woman, especially feminists, wanted it to be known that they were volcanic hairstyles and padded shoulders above the leering of mucky old men’ (although the old but rich and ‘toy boys’ appeared to be exempt). Sexual jokes and innuendoes were no longer to be brooked; the Italian pinch or pat on the bum became strictly a bridge too far, and as for those cheeky construction workers bound by tradition to wolf whistle whenever they clocked the cheeks of, or cast their eyes across, the various assorted feminine goods purposefully displayed to them, their interest in the freely on offer was ordered to cease forthwith; the whistling had to stop, although the setting out of the carnal stall continued unabated.

A moody feminist in the UK

Now, I have no idea what goes through your mind when you first clap eyes on or meet a woman, but I’d hazard a layman’s guess that it has little to do with her credentials as a hot-shot exec female or whether she can or cannot hold an in-depth conversation on the philosophical works of Kant (Careful with that spell checker!) or has practical skills in woodwork. But the real question is, and has been since the 1990s, when PC first appeared, if, as we are led to believe, UK women regard themselves generically, that’s wholesale, as distant cousins to sexuality, demanding to be identified by their labour skills and brains, then why do so many still in this age of Ms equality, professional or otherwise, dress in what is defined traditionally as outfits worn by tarts (apologies to jam and biscuits)? Like charity that begins at home, sexual objectification begins primarily with the object itself, not, as alleged, the objectifying.

Anyway, getting back to this certain pub in a certain part of Bedford. Bedford isn’t Bedlam, and neither is this pub – on a Saturday night it is worse! You might want to call it a clusterf*ck! Liberals would describe it as a hip and vibrant venue, a popular haunt for the dynamic young – ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’, they would quoth – a lively, relaxed and fun-loving crowd just wanting to let off steam. And in this respect, indeed, they were. Some sights, I must confess, were steaming up my glasses, testing my resolve to define women in the new-age light as prescribed by liberal doctrine, but steel myself as I might to ignore what my eyes beheld and its impact upon my reprobation (Forgive me, Lord! For I am male!), I could not altogether resist Aphrodite’s timeless charms and the wish she would have me entertain to become, and instantly, younger – by about 100 years, I’d say.

Other ‘ladies’ there were who were steaming in a different fashion, and yet, although they were out to get the same thing as their nimble counterparts, as they lumbered around like steamrollers with huge, tree-trunk, cellulite legs clad in bum-hugging skirts or shorts that were much to short for them into which they had awkwardly squeezed, and sometimes squeezed far too tightly, making them look like sausage meat overstuffed in skins, I wondered if they would ever get what it was they were after or remain for the rest of their days in a limbo state of disappointment. It’s exactly times like these that I’m glad I’m vegetarian. Had Stan, Jack and Benny been here, they would have had a field day! And here’s the topsy-turvy of it, for in spite of all we’ve been led to believe about modern British women, I think I can honestly say that I’ve never seen so many females embracing objectification since I worked on the local pig farm. Ah, so that’s what it reminded me of: that terrible shrieking din of youngsters and the letting off of their clouds of steam!

Large female arse in panties with 'Yes please' written on them

The contention of to what degree, if any, women ought to be obliged to take responsibility for the manner in which they dress and behave in public, if not merely for their own safety, then out of common respect for Modesty, is an issue framed in the larger debate of whether a rights-obsessed society should encourage every member of it, from politicians to media moguls to the happy-go-lucky migrants to women out on the town, to adopt the type of double standards that circumvent and short-circuit moral codes of responsibility, shaping the world’s wise opinion of the kind of society that Britain wasn’t but now, sadly, has become.

And if the answer is ‘no’, then where should such standards trickle from if not from the highest office in the land? Should the backdoor to double standards be left off its Yale lock here, then the thief that covets morality will perceive the right to go amongst us, sacking and plundering without redress and mugging us at will.

From turning your back on an ally, to turning the other cheek, as Labour’s Rochdale councillors did as cheeks were being turned; to letting the boats come flooding in; to ignoring the rising tide of crime; to an attitude of ‘sod their morrows’ by endorsing Sodom and Gomorrah; to paying perpetual homage to the one-way god of rights – this, then, is the topsy-turvy life, a life of confusing contradictions, that we live in the UK today. Thus verily unto you I say, and I am sure you will agree, that in pausing to examine it, it is all so peculiar.

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Image attribution

Map of the UK: https://www.needpix.com/photo/1420206/
Lion with black eye: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-drawing-of-lion-with-black-eye/23181.html
Man worried about the bill: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Man-worried-about-the-bill-vector/2313.html
18th century ‘Topsy Turvy Woodcuts’ (stylised female figure): https://pdimagearchive.org/images/a6a3caa0-5f4b-475f-a1ae-461a345410ac/
18th century ‘Topsy Turvy Woodcuts’ (Death): https://pdimagearchive.org/images/9e11814b-ce52-497a-a726-bc29439b1f64/
Shoplifter: http://www.clker.com/cliparts/2/8/d/8/15161602671477924418shoplifting-clipart.hi.png
Serious woman: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Serious-woman-profile-vector-image/22941.html
‘Yes please’ knickers: https://freesvg.org/index.php/big-bootie

Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information

Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information

Obtaining a Visa for Kaliningrad, Russia

Revised 19 April 2026 ~ Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information

Airspace Closures

Russia has closed its airspace to airlines from multiple countries in direct response to airspace closures effecting its airlines, which were introduced by western governments opposing Russia’s military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Natzify’ Ukraine. Airlines on the banned list are prohibited from landing in or flying over Russian territory. As a result, air travel disruptions are widespread. If you intend to travel in the immediate future, you should contact your airline or travel agent for further information.
Links to Airport/Airlines websites can be found at the end of this guide

Blog links
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open?
How to get to Kaliningrad from the UK
Gdansk to Kaliningrad by Bus

Useful links

To visit Kaliningrad, you will need to apply for and have been issued with a Russian visa. For those of you who are not sure what one of these is, it is an official document that permits you to legally enter a foreign country, in this case the Russian Federation. The visa is valid for a specific duration of time. It contains the date of entry to the country and the date of exit, as well as your name, travel document (passport) details and the purpose for which you are travelling.

There are various types of visa depending upon the nature of your visit, but, for the sake of this blog, let’s assume that you are visiting Kaliningrad as a tourist.

Russia Kaliningrad Tourist Information: Tourist Visa

A tourist visa will allow you to enter Kaliningrad and leave within a specified time frame of 30 days. This means that the maximum length of stay in Kaliningrad is 30 days and no more. It is important that you leave the country before or on the date of exit. 

Before a tourist visa can be issued, you will need to have confirmation of where you will be staying throughout the duration of your visit. Two documents are required, commonly referred to as ‘visa support documents’, and they consist of (1) a voucher and (2) a booking confirmation.

If you are staying in a hotel, you will need to ask the hotel to send you a hotel voucher and confirmation of tourist acceptance. Once you have received these, you are then ready to make your application.

To complete your visa application, you will need the following:

1. An original passport, valid for more than 6 months, containing at
least 2 blank pages for your visa and entry/exit stamps

2. An application form

3. One valid passport-type photograph

4. Payment for application

Note: The Russian Service Centre (the Russian National Tourist Office) can assist you with all stages of your application, including visa support documents. You can contact them by telephone on 0207 985 1195 and/or visit this page on their website: https://www.visitrussia.org.uk/visas/getting-a-russian-visa/

Their location and postal address is:

Russian Service Centre
Russian National Tourist Office
202 Kensington Church Street
London W8 4DP

The Russian Service Centre in London is currently operating on an ‘appointment only’ basis. Please use the following link for further information: https://russia-visacenter.com/en/visa/united-kingdom/russia/contact-us

Applications for a Russian visa are typically handled online now, and all the information and guidance that you need can be obtained by visiting this page: How to obtain a Russian visa in 2026– guide & application steps

However, you will still be required to go in person to the Russian Tourist Office at 202 Kensington Church St, London W8 4DP, for biometric scanning. This sounds worse than it is. Biometric scanning means that you need to supply your fingerprints.

You can attend the office to submit your fingerprints Monday to Friday from 9am until 1pm. Click here for a map of the Tourist Office location.

Russian Tourist Offices (also referred to as Russian Visa Application Centres) are also located in Manchester and Edinburgh. However, the Manchester office has been closed for some time now, so that leaves you with the choice of London or Edinburgh. The address of the Edinburgh office is 64 Albion Rd, Edinburgh EH7 5QZ. Tel: 0131 661 7279. Visa applications operate by appointment.

Alternatively, if you don’t mind paying for it, visa officers can come to your office or home anywhere in the UK and take your fingerprints there. Click on this link for more information: https://www.visitrussia.org.uk/visas/getting-a-russian-visa/biometric-data/

The time it takes for you to receive your Russian visa depends on which service you pay for. Visas can be received within two days of the completion of the application procedure.

Electronic Visa (E-visa)

Yes, Russia does implement an electronic visa (e-visa) system for entering the Russian Federation. The citizens of sixty-four countries are eligible to apply using this fast-track system, but, unfortunately, as Britain is officially designated an ‘Unfriendly Country’ by Russia, those holding a British passport are excluded from this list. Visa applicants from the UK are thus requested to apply, using the old-fashioned paper route, via Russian Visa Application Centres in London, Manchester or Edinburgh.

Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information: Professional visa support company

To make things easier for you, there are various visa-support companies that you can contact, which will take you through the entire process. My support company of choice is Stress Free Visas, if only because if you do get stressed whilst using them, you can have a good laugh at your own expense! Their website address is www.stressfreevisas.co.uk.

When using their service, you will be asked to fill out an application form online. It is as well to know what to expect before you start, since when they start asking you questions, such as ‘What is your inside leg measurement?’, it will be difficult to do so unless you have a tape measure already at hand. OK, it’s not that bad, not quite, but there is information that you will need that you might inconceivably not have thought of.

To this end, please see the following:

Q: Who is paying for your trip to Russia?
A: [If it is you, put ‘independently’]

####

You will be asked ‘information about your financial situation’. You will need to enter your ‘overall monthly income from all sources’ and various other financial details.

####

You will need to include your National Insurance number

####

You will be asked to enter ‘place of birth’ and ‘date and place of birth’ of your spouse

####

You will be asked to provide the following details about your parents:

Name
Date, country & place of birth
Nationality
If deceased, date & place of death

####

You will be asked to provide the name of the hotel you will be staying at, plus address and telephone number

####

And that, as Bruce Forsyth used to say, “is all there is to it!”

To assist you in all visa-related matters, here again is the web address for Stress Free Visas: www.stressfreevisas.co.uk

Russian Tourist and Visa Offices

London
The Russian Service Centre (the Russian National Tourist Office)
202 Kensington Church Street, London W8 4DP
Tel: 0207 985 1195
https://www.visitrussia.org.uk/visas/getting-a-russian-visa/

Edinburgh
Russian Visa Application Centre
Tel: 0131 661 7279
https://russia-visacenter.com/en/visa/united-kingdom/russia

Note: The London centre offers couriers or mail-based applications as well as in-person visits. The Edinburgh Centre operates an in-person system only. All in-person visits must be booked in advance.

Visa advice from gov.uk

Poland: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/poland/entry-requirements

Lithuania: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/lithuania/entry-requirements

Airlines

Lot Airways
Web: www.lot.com

Aeroflot
Web: www.aeroflot.ru

Wizz Air
Web: www.wizzair.com

Rynair
Web: www.ryanair.com

Airports

Khrabrovo Airport, Kaliningrad
Web: https://kgdavia.ru/
Tel : +8 (401) 255 05 50

Luton London Airport
Web: https://www.london-luton.co.uk/
Tel: 01582 405100

Gdansk Airport
Web: https://www.airport.gdansk.pl/
Tel: +48 52 567 35 31  

 Vilnius International Airport
Web: https://www.vilnius-airport.lt/
Tel: +370 612 44442

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

RECENT POSTS

Mick Hart at the Art Depot Bar and Restaurant in Kaliningrad

Art Depot Kaliningrad – beer for a one-track mind

A little of what you fancy does you good – and so does a little more of it. With an essay prefacing the status of ales versus victuals and what a restaurant means to some when a bar can be seen by others.

10 April 2026: Art Depot Kaliningrad – beer for a one-track mind

As a seasoned pub-goer, nay, a patriotic supporter of what is undoubtedly one of the UK’s most important cultural assets, the British pub, qualified to say so from having lived a so-called pub lifestyle from the age of 14 and, during the time I was resident in London, reputed to have required an A to Z knowledge of London pubs, may I say without equivocation – and why not, indeed? – that the quest to boldly go and seek out hitherto unknown drinking venues, whilst as exciting as it is dutiful, does not rule out that there is a lot to be said for returning to the scene of the crime, which many a splendid bar or pub might unfairly be denounced as by stay-at-home abstemious naysayers and those who would rather drink from the bottle whilst sitting in front of the telly.

“Pubs and bars are like women; some are worth a second visit and some most definitely not” – The Sexist’s Guide to Male Dominated Traditions by Lord Wollocks.

When I first landed in Kaliningrad, in the year of our Lord (Wollocks!) 2000, there were so few bars to go around that if it hadn’t been for the Sir Francis Drake and the most exceptional 12 Chairs (R.I.P.), the only way of not returning to drink in them would have been not to go out at all.

Thankfully, in more recent years the situation has moved in the right direction. Kaliningrad is now a city with an eclectic range of bars, all of which would come in useful even if you never used them, which is something I would never do, as I use them whenever I can. ‘Roodly do’ is a phrase that inconveniently comes to mind at this juncture, not because I ‘roodly do’ use bars, but because it was a favourite catchphrase that rose to prominence in the 1980s through my aunt’s repeated use of it.

Thought I: “That expression will come in useful even if I never use it”, and, to prove it, although I have just used it, it has served no use at all.

Art Depot Kaliningrad

Now, some of Kaliningrad’s bars identify themselves as restaurants, which is a taxonomy I can live with, as the food that they serve is hardly limited to a humble packet of crisps bolstered by the insertion of an acquired-taste pickled egg, once standard fare in British pubs when I was too young to be drinking in them, although I always was.

The introduction of ‘pub grub’ was heralded in the UK as a major breakthrough by those who like to take solids with their drink, but its impact on the established consensus of what a pub should traditionally be was, like allowing kids to run riot in pubs, anathema to the old guard, among whose sagacious ranks I proudly claim to number. Indeed, Rolly Smith, a valued friend and respected drinking partner, confided that his father had condemned the arrival of food in pubs as a flagrant assault on the honoured conventions of that most noble of British institutions: “It’s only pigs”, he used to say, “that eat and drink at the same time!” Being a one-time pig farmer and now vegetarian convert disqualifies me from commenting on the veracity of this statement in recognition that a conflict of interests could lead to anything that I say being taken down, twisted round and used in evidence against me.

I can say, however, and should say, however, and therefore I will, that as a devoted beer drinker, food is often off the itinerary when drinking beer in bars and pubs. It is not so terribly difficult for me to apply myself to this golden rule, as food is an unfair competitor in the allocation of volume stakes when it comes to imbibing beer; moreover, whenever temptation may suddenly strike, I am reminded of the words of wisdom conveyed to us by Mr Rowbottom, my primary school headmaster, who sanguinely divided the world into two distinctive camps defined by him as eating compulsion, namely, those ‘who live to eat’ and those ‘who eat to live’, with my allegiance solemnly sworn to the minority sect of the latter. However, posit the question, if you must, ‘Do I live to drink?’ and it is not so easily answered.

The best thing to do with that, therefore, is to leave it gently dangling, turning at last, as you must be growing impatient, thinking, ‘Where is he going with this?’ to apply all that which has gone before to the subject of this post, which, as the title gives away, is Kaliningrad’s Art Depot Restaurant but which, according to my perception of it, is Kaliningrad’s Art Depot Bar.

Art Depot Kaliningrad – bar and restaurant

I am sure, to the vague extent that I can be sure about anything, that, as on my previous visit, I must have dined on something, and I am almost just as certain that whatever that something was, it must have been up to snuff, but the reason for my return was that I was desirous not of the food but of the range of beers that there are on tap and a second chance to soak them up whilst also imbibing the Art Depot atmosphere.

Art Depot Kaliningrad: a bar and restaurant occupying Ponart Brewery's former beer cellar

The novelty of having one’s drinks delivered in the rolling stock of a large model train is one of those things that can never grow old and goes exceptionally well with the vaulted cellar ceiling and the detailed dioramas of the railway stations and resident districts of the various Prussian towns to which the train delivers its vital cargo.

In Kaliningrad, a bar that delivers your bar order by train

Above: Art Depot’s train reversing back into Königsberg/Kaliningrad rail station, ie the bar, to load up with another cargo of beverages.
Below: Model architectural, urban and village district scenes lend to the unusual.

The horseshoe-shaped curved banquette booths ensure a plush, cosy, comfortable and intimate dining and drinking experience, especially should you be able to boast of sufficient friends or relatives to descend there as a group. But no matter how much you fall in love with any one seat and location, permit me to offer a little advice: on subsequent visits, be adventurous; go for a seat you haven’t yet sat in, as each location around the room has a unique perspective to offer.

On the evening to which the photographs here pertain, we were seated close to the bar, a location to which I am eminently suited, for not only did it allow me to feast my eyes on the beer stock and watch the barman playing the taps, but I also spotted a namesake whisky whose brand I was unacquainted with. Though not, as a rule, a spirits drinker, this Hart Brothers’ distillation was far too much of a bold coincidence to let it pass unsampled, and I am sure had both of my brothers been present, they would not have foregone the opportunity to have joined me in a wee dram.

Hart Brothers whisky at the Art Depot Kaliningrad Bar & Restaurant

You can’t get enough of a good thing

The Art Depot Restaurant is part of Kaliningrad’s intriguing Ponart Brewery complex, a restored 19th-century, multistorey, redbrick building with a superlative brewing history surrounded by an assortment of shops and other cultural amenities. Brewing has been returned to the premises (yummy); there are guided beer-tasting tours, and, preferably whilst your head is still clear, you can, if the mood so takes you, clamber into the viewing tower and survey the old industrial site and the district it inhabits.

I tend to put my faith in history, because I do not trust the present, and the future has all but expired. Beer and history have been going steady for as long as I can remember. So, let’s toddle along to the Art Depot Restaurant and raise a glass to both of them.

Here’s where the good thing is:

Art Depot Restaurant, Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad, Sudostroitelnaya st., 6-8
(on the territory of the historical quarter ‘Ponart’)

Tel (reservations): +7 (963) 295 74 95

Website: https://artdepo39.ru/

Opening times
Mon to Fri: 11am to 10pm
Sat & Sun: 12pm to 11pm

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK

UK to Kaliningrad

Updated: 28 March 2026 ~ How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK

Airspace Closures

Russia has closed its airspace to airlines from multiple countries in direct response to airspace closures effecting its airlines, which were introduced by western governments opposing Russia’s military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Nazify’ Ukraine. Airlines on the banned list are prohibited from landing in or flying over Russian territory. As a result, air travel disruptions are widespread. If you intend to travel in the immediate future, you should contact your airline or travel agent for further information.
Links to Airport/Airlines websites can be found at the end of this guide

Jump to categories

Flights from the UK to Kaliningrad
From Khrabrovo Airport to Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad via Gdansk, Poland
Bussing it from Gdansk to Kaliningrad
Taxi services from Kaliningrad Central Bus Station
Kaliningrad via Lithuania
Links to Airport & Airline websites
Links to Bus & Rail Services
Links to Kaliningrad Taxis

How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK

Most people travelling from the UK to Kaliningrad are not going to do so by car, train, taxi, bicycle or hitching. Some of you might, but most of you won’t. You’ll want to come by plane, so that’s what I will focus on here.

Flights from the UK to Kaliningrad

As far as I am aware, there are no direct flights from the UK to Kaliningrad, and there has not been for some time.

The last time I flew back from Kaliningrad to London direct was many years ago. I remember it well, as I sat in the front of the plane looking through the open door to the flight deck. The date was 10 September 2001. It was most probably the last day that you would be able to do that on an international airliner.

I am told that the only ‘convenient’ way to fly to Kaliningrad from Europe is to fly to Turkey and from there to Kaliningrad. If you aren’t in the market for paying between £400-£800 pounds, then I wouldn’t bother.

If you do fly to Kaliningrad, you will land at Khrabrovo Airport. Once a relatively small red-brick building dating from the Königsberg era with a high wire fence, today Khrabrovo Airport is a modern terminal possessing all the usual facilities.

From Khrabrovo Airport to Kaliningrad

The distance from Khrabrovo Airport to Kaliningrad Central is about 23 km, and the journey takes approximately 20 to 30 minutes.

The easiest way of getting to Kaliningrad is by taxi. Look for the cubicles by the airport terminal exit, which offer taxi services. The fare to the centre of Kaliningrad typically costs between 700 and 1000 roubles (approx. £6.48–£9.26). Here is a price guide by destination,using licensed taxis (recommended).

The cheaper option is to travel by bus: fare 50 roubles (0.38 pence). The route number is 244-Э. Payment is made on the bus, either to the driver or a conductor. Buses run frequently, about every 30 minutes, between 7.00am and 8.20pm (Link to Bus Timetable). The average time of the journey to Kaliningrad’s Yuzhniy Bus Station is 40 to 50 minutes.

Kaliningrad via Gdansk, Poland

Wizz Air: How to get to Kaliningrad from the UK
(Photo credit: Serhiy Lvivsky)

The route that most of us take when travelling to Kaliningrad is to fly by Wizz Airlines from Luton London Airport to Gdansk and then travel from Gdansk to Kaliningrad.

Time was once that I would take a pre-booked taxi from Gdansk Airport to Kaliningrad. If you had contacts in Kaliningrad, which I had, someone could arrange this for you. In 2024, I was told that the journey to Kaliningrad from Gdansk Airport would cost you in the region of £200-300. This is a gigantic leap in price from the 100 quid that I was paying back in 2019. Why? Could the price hike be associated with border-crossing difficulties emanating from coronavirus restrictions, a by-product of Western sanctions or just plain old profiteering? Whatever the explanation, you might be of the opinion that the taxi option is no longer viable. Even if you like spending money, Poland is no longer accepting vehicles with Russian number plates crossing from Kaliningrad into Poland (now, where’s my screwdriver!) (Link to article on Poland’s extraordinary measures. It also mentions a ‘big wall’, so you won’t go climbing over that, will you, with or without licence plates! So there!)

🤔Is the Poland-Kaliningrad border open? (A personal reflection)

Bussing it from Gdansk to Kaliningrad

First from Gdansk Airport to Gdansk city bus station

I have travelled by bus to and from Kaliningrad via Gdansk many times now.

To do this, you must first take a bus or taxi from Gdansk Airport to Gdansk Bus Station, located at 3 Maja St, 12.

The bus line is 210. The bus fare is 4.80 zloty (0.97 pence). The service operates every 30 minutes and takes about 35 to 40 minutes to reach Gdansk city bus station.

After rolling out of bed at 4am in the morning to catch a flight from London Luton Airport, I am inclined to travel to Gdansk bus station by taxi.

There are plenty of taxis at the airport rank, and the cost of the trip is about 90 zloty (£21). The trip takes approximately 10 to 15 minutes.

And now, from Gdansk bus station to Kaliningrad

The bus ticket from Gdansk costs 155-190 zloty (approximately £31 to £38). There are multiple buses a day from Gdansk Bus Station, and the last bus leaves at 5.00pm. The approximate travel time is advertised at 3 hrs and 30 mins and 4 hrs and 30 mins, depending on the route, but in reality it often takes longer than this, due to the grilling you get at both borders, especially since the Polish border authorities introduced the practice of photographing everyone on board: Smile, please; we are going to make crossing into Kaliningrad extremely irritating for you. It will be inside leg measurements next! (Spoiler: On a couple of occasions, I was stuck at the borders for 8 hours! Make sure your sim cards are working, your phone is charged or you have a book to read!)

Catching the bus means buying tickets online in advance. By far the most straightforward and therefore best online booking service is Busfor.pl

Example of Busfor’s Gdansk to Kaliningrad page below:

How to get to Kaliningrad from the UK. The Busfor timetable.

There was a time when the bay from which the Gdansk>Kaliningrad bus service operated was Gdansk’s best-kept secret. You could try asking at the bus information office, but if they had that information, they would not be letting you have it. Later, they stuck a piece of paper on the wall, which revealed the bay to be number 11. Don’t be put off if when arriving at the bay you see the name Królewiec and not Kaliningrad. According to what I have read, in 2023 some bright Polish spark came up with the idea of renaming Kaliningrad or, as they put it, reverting the name to its historical Polish name. That’s helpful, isn’t it?

The facilities at Gdańsk Bus Station are bog standard. It does have a bog (it will cost you 5 zloty for a pee), but the metal tins that used to function as a left-luggage department have moved, TARDIS-fashion, from the interior of the bus station to a bit around the back of it (you will need zlotys to activate these), and the bus station cafe, which was basic but useful, as there are no other cafes nearby, has closed. There is a burger bar in the bus park, which, in winter, has a plastic sheet around it, where you can stand and wait for your order.

At the time of writing, you will have approximately two hours to kill if you catch, for example, the morning flight from London Luton Airport to Gdansk in time to catch the 3.00pm bus. My advice is to take a walk into Gdansk Old Town for great cafes and a historic atmosphere.

The buses dock at Kaliningrad’s Central Bus Station in the vicinity of the city’s South Railway Station. Change here for local buses, coaches to Svetlogorsk/Zelenogradsk coastal resorts and taxi services.

Public transport to the city centre is plentiful, including trolley bus services, mini-buses and trams. Note, however, that some buses operate on a no-conductor electronic-card basis. If you haven’t got a Russian bank card or a ‘Volna Baltiky’ transport card (the cheapest option at 33 roubles) use conductor-served buses. I have worked out (at least, I think I have) that the orange buses take card payments only. The mini-buses accept cash as well as cards. Approximate fare to anywhere in the city is 48 roubles.

Taxi services from Kaliningrad Central Bus Station: !!! Scam alert: Avoid the gaggle of taxis that huddle and hustle around the immediate vicinity where the bus from Gdansk to Kaliningrad terminates. The motley crew that operate these dodgy deals on wheels are to be avoided at all costs, unless you want to triple or quadruple the going rate.

Reputable taxi services are typically accessed via the following websites/apps:

  • Local taxis can be booked by telephoning 33-33-33
  • Airport transfers can be pre-booked using Utransfer

Kaliningrad via Lithuania

It was once possible to get a train from Vilnius, Lithuania, to Kaliningrad (the trip took about 7 hours). That service has been suspended now. As for travelling by bus, the information served up on the net is vague and conflicting. It seems that all direct intercity bus services have ceased, but, for 37 euros (£32), a once-a-day indirect bus still functions. Only consider this option if you are into long bus journeys, as the grapevine suggests that the trip from somewhere in Lithuania to Kaliningrad takes 21 hours. Bon voyage! See Omio.

Rumour has it that an alternative to the cross-border bus from Vilnius is to use local buses/trains, cross on foot via the Kibartai-Chernyshevskoe border and then use local buses/trains on the Russian side. I cannot confirm this, as I have not personally used this route, but it is one you might like to check out.

Panemunė–Sovetsk (where you can cross on foot!)
This is a foot-friendly (and no other type of vehicle) crossing from Lithuania into Kaliningrad, Russia, and vice versa.

It requires taking a bus or taxi or being dropped off by a relative or friend at the checkpoint, walking across and then continuing your journey on the other side by one of the three means cited.

The crossing is located in the town of Panemunė (Lithuania).

To cross, you will need a valid passport and a Russian visa (or e-visa).

It is highly recommended to check via the  official Lithuania-Russia border crossing website before attempting to cross, to ascertain accessibility, as regulations could change.

📄Kaliningrad Visa Information when travelling from UK 📄

Airlines

Lot Airways
Web: www.lot.com

Aeroflot
Web: www.aeroflot.ru

Wizz Air
Web: www.wizzair.com

Rynair
Web: www.ryanair.com

Airports

Khrabrovo Airport Kaliningrad
Web: www.kgd.aero
Tel: +7 4012 300 300
Taxi service: +7 (4012) 91 91 91

London Luton Airport
Web: www.london-luton.co.uk

Gdansk Airport
Web: www.airport.gdansk.pl
Tel: 801 066 808  / +48 525 673 531  

Vilnius International Airport
Web: https://www.vilnius-airport.lt/
Tel: +370 612 44442

Busfor
Web: https://busfor.pl/buses/Gdansk/Kaliningrad

Information on Bus Services between Gdansk & Kaliningrad
Web: www.rome2rio.com/s/Gdansk-Airport-GDN/Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad Central Bus Station
Web: https://avl39.ru/en/
Tel: (Information desk) +7 4012 64 36 35
Email: info@avl39.ru

Kaliningrad South Railway Station
Web: https://rasp.yandex.ru/station/9623137/suburban/?date=all-days&direction=all
(See also) https://kzd.rzd.ru/
Tel: +7 (4012) 60 08 88   

Reputable taxi services are typically accessed via the following websites/apps:

Yandex.Taxi 
Maxim taxi
Local taxis, telephone: 33-33-33
Airport transfers can be pre-booked via Utransfer

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

RECENT POSTS

Königsberg Cathedral organ

Awesome Königsberg Cathedral Organ Concerts

Culture on a cold evening

Revised 23 March 2026 | First Published: 8 February 2021 ~ Awesome Königsberg Cathedral Organ Concerts

Can you spot the clue in one of the photographs providing evidence that this was first written in 2021? First prize: a face mask.

We recently received a kind invitation to attend an organ concert at Königsberg Cathedral. This was the first time that I had been to a concert there, and I was keen to discover if the sound of the cathedral’s pipe organ was as impressive as the organ looked.

With temperatures outside falling to as low as -17 degrees, we were surprised, happily surprised, to discover that in spite of the capacious size of the cathedral, it was warm and comfortable. For a building that had been reduced to a shell in the Second World War by RAF bombing and subsequently and painstakingly restored, the atmosphere and ambience are superb. Lighting is important in any environment, but particularly so in exhibition and concert halls, and here it cannot be faulted.

Königsberg Cathedral Organ Concerts

The colonnades, sturdy walls and Gothic vaulted ceiling served the acoustics well, the hard surfaces deflecting the quieter notes distinctly and the deeper tones with generous resonance. The organ rolled, rumbled and reverberated, the multiple dense sounds thundering spectacularly from numerous points within the building’s chambers.

Mick Hart in Königsberg Cathedral experiencing  Awesome Königsberg Cathedral Organ Concerts
Oga Hart in Königsberg Cathedral

I will admit that I am not much of an opera aficionado, but on this occasion I felt that the dulcet tones of the singer complimented and contrasted perfectly with the rich and varied tones of the pipe organ.

Related posts
Königsberg Cathedral Organ pulls out all the stops
Königsberg Cathedral: a story of survival

At the close of the concert, we chose to walk around the back of the cathedral, past Kant’s tomb. My wife, Olga, rightly commented that here, outside and within the cathedral, the spirit of the city of Königsberg lives on.

This was so true, and I felt rather guilty that I had not visited the cathedral more frequently since moving to Kaliningrad.

I confess that since the death of our friend Victor Ryabinin in the summer of 2019, I have been purposefully avoiding the cathedral and the surrounding area. The cathedral and Kneiphof Island are only a stone’s throw away from Victor Ryabinin’s former art studio and as such constituted the epicentre of his cultural and historical world. There were so many memories that I did not want to face, and so many more, like this evening’s, which he may once have contributed to but now never will ~ at least, that is, in person.

But you cannot hide forever, and I was glad that I had agreed to attend the concert this evening.

Even in the falling temperatures and with noses looking like beetroots, Olga managed to snap some photos of the cathedral on this very cold winter’s night, which capture the magical quality of the external lighting and how it is used to imaginative effect.

Brrrr: It was time to rattle back home on the number 5 tram and, once indoors, make with the cognac!

Königsberg Cathedral Organ Concerts:
Königsberg Cathedral website: http://sobor39.ru/

This was the concert lineup for the 6th of February 2021:

Titular organist of the Cathedral, laureate of international competitions, Mansur Yusupov

Soloist of the Kaliningrad Regional Philharmonic, laureate of international competitions, Anahit Mkrtchyan (soprano)

Music and song featured works from the following composers:

A. Vivaldi
A. Scarlatti
G. F. Handel
J. Pergolesi
J. S. Bach
V. Gomez
M. Lawrence,
A. Babajanyan

Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.