British Poles, alternatively known as Polish British people or Polish Britons, are ethnic Poles who are citizens of the United Kingdom. The term includes people born in the UK who are of Polish descent and Polish-born people who reside in the UK. There are approximately 682,000. people born in Poland residing in the UK. Since the late 20th century, they have become one of the largest ethnic minorities in the country alongside Irish, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Germans, and Chinese. The Polish language is the second-most spoken language in England and the third-most spoken in the UK after English and Welsh. About 1% of the UK population speaks Polish (2013). The Polish population in the UK has increased more than tenfold since 2001.

Exchanges between the two countries date to the Middle Ages, when the Kingdom of England and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were linked by trade and diplomacy. A notable 16th-century Polish resident in England was John Laski, a Protestant convert who influenced the course of the English Reformation and helped in establishing the Church of England. Following the 18th-century dismemberment of the Commonwealth in three successive partitions by Poland's neighbours, the trickle of Polish immigrants to Britain increased in the aftermath of two 19th-century uprisings (1831 and 1863) that forced much of Poland's social and political elite into exile. London became a haven for the burgeoning ideas of Polish socialism as a solution for regaining independence as it sought international support for the forthcoming Polish uprising.Józef Buszko, Narodziny ruchu socjalistycznego na ziemiach polskich, Kraków 1967, pp. 8–32 (in Polish) A number of Polish exiles fought in the Crimean War on the British side. In the late 19th century governments mounted pogroms against Polish Jews in the Russian (Congress Poland) and Austrian sectors of partitioned Poland (Galicia). Many Polish Jews fled their partitioned homeland, and most emigrated to the United States, but some settled in British cities, especially London, Manchester, Leeds and Kingston upon Hull.Andrew Godley, 2001) Enterprise and Culture, New York, Palgrave, 2001, , chapter 1.Rosemary O'Day, "The Jews of London: From Diaspora to Whitechapel" http://fathom.lse.ac.uk/Features/122537/

The number of Poles in Britain increased during the Second World War. Most of the Polish people who came to the United Kingdom at that time came as part of military units reconstituted outside Poland after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II. On 3 September 1939, Britain and France, which were allied with Poland, declared war on Germany. Poland moved its government abroad, first to France and, after its fall in May 1940, to London. The Poles contributed greatly to the Allied war effort; Polish naval units were the first Polish forces to integrate with the Royal Navy under the Peking Plan. Polish pilots played a conspicuous role in the Battle of Britain and the Polish army formed in Britain later participated in the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The great majority of Polish military veterans were stranded in Britain after the UK's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the USA's president, first Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and then Harry Truman, allowed the Soviet Union to impose communist control on Poland at the conferences in Tehran and Yalta after the war. This particularly concerned Polish soldiers from eastern areas, which were no longer part of Poland as a result of border changes due to the Potsdam Agreement.Sword, Keith. (1991) Ed. The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–1941 Basingstoke: Macmillan in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London The Polish government-in-exile, though denied majority international recognition after 1945, remained at its post in London until it formally dissolved in 1991, after a democratically elected president had taken office in Warsaw.

The European Union's 2004 enlargement and the UK Government's decision to allow immigration from the new accession states, encouraged Polish people to move to Britain rather than to Germany. Additionally, the Polish diaspora in Britain includes descendants of the nearly 200,000 Polish people who had originally settled in Britain after the Second World War. About one-fifth had moved to settle in other parts of the British Empire.Chojnacki, Paweł. (2008) 'The Making of Polish London through Everyday Life 1956–1976', doctoral thesis UCL, http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/17420/1/17420.pdf, fn. 4 p. 12

History

A Polish cleric named John Laski (1499–1560), nephew of Jan Łaski (1456–1531), converted to Calvinism while in Basel, Switzerland, where he became an associate of Archbishop Cranmer. After moving to London, in 1550 he was superintendent of the Strangers' Church of London and had some influence on ecclesiastical affairs in the reign of Edward VI. Laski also spent some years working on the establishment of the Church of England. Shortly before his death, he was recalled to Poland's royal court.

In the 16th century, when most grain imports to the British Isles came from Poland, Polish merchants and diplomats regularly travelled there, usually on the Eastland Company trade route from Gdańsk to London. Shakespeare mentions Polish people in his play Hamlet (e.g. "sledded polack"), which Israel Gollancz attributes to influence of the book, De optimo senatore (The Accomplished Senator), by Laurentius Grimaldius Goslicius (Wawrzyniec Grzymała Goślicki, a Polish bishop and noble). Gollancz further speculated that the book inspired Shakespeare to create the character Polonius, which is Latin for "Polish".

After Poland's King John III, at the head of a coalition of European armies, defeated the invading Ottoman forces at the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna, a pub in London's Soho district was named "The King of Poland" in his honour, and soon afterwards the street on which it stands was named Poland Street (and continues to be so to this day). In the 18th century, Polish Protestants settled around Poland Street as religious refugees fleeing the Counter-Reformation in Poland.

18th century

As a young man of the Enlightenment, and already befriended by a Welsh diplomat, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, the young Stanislaus Poniatowski, future and last King of Poland, stayed in Britain for some months during 1754. On this trip he also came to know Charles Yorke, the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain.Michalski, Jerzy. "Stanisław August Poniatowski", Polski Słownik Biograficzny, vol.41, 2011, p. 613

In 1788, during the closing years of Stanislaus' reign, after the first Partition of Poland in 1772, the Polish called a special assembly, known to history as the Four Years Diet or "Great Sejm" whose great achievement was to be the Constitution of 3 May 1791. In that period Poland sought support from the Kingdom of Great Britain in its negotiations with Prussia in an effort to stave off further threats from Russia and from its own plotting magnates.

In 1790, King Stanislaus Augustus sent Michał Kleofas Ogiński (also a composer and mentor to Frederic Chopin) on an embassy to London to meet with Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. The British were prepared, along with the Dutch, to propose a favourable commercial treaty for Polish goods, especially flax, if Poland ceded the cities of Gdańsk and Toruń to the Prussians. This condition was unacceptable to Poland.

Stanislaus Augustus also commissioned the London art dealership of Bourgeois and Desenfans to assemble a collection of Old Master paintings for Poland to encourage arts in the Commonwealth. The dealers fulfilled their commission, but five years later Poland as a state ceased to exist following the third and final Partition.Nisbet Bain, R. (1909) The Last King of Poland and his Contemporaries London: Methuen & Co. http://scans.library.utoronto.ca/pdf/1/30/lastkingofpoland00bainuoft/lastkingofpoland00bainuoft.pdf p. 207 The art collection destined for Poland became the nucleus of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London.

19th century

In the 19th century, Polish-British relations took on a cultural dimension, with musical tours in the United Kingdom by virtuosos and composers including Maria Szymanowska, Frederic Chopin, Maria Kalergis and Henryk Wieniawski.Hoffmann, Freia. (2011). "Kalergis ... (Gräfin) Maria", :de:Sophie Drinker Institut. The book contains an English-language contemporary appreciation of Kalergis as an interpreter of Schumann and Chopin by British diplomat Horace Rumbold. http://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/cms/index.php/kalergis-maria in German, retrieved 12–29–2017.

During the November 1830 Uprising against the Russian Empire, British military equipment and armaments were sent to Poland, facilitated by the presence of Leon Łubieński studying at Edinburgh University at the time and the swift despatch to Britain of his uncle, Józef, to secure the shipment.Kalinowski, Zdzisław. (2013). The Marriage of Count Tomasz and Countess Konstancja Łubieński at their estate of Rejowiec. http://kalinowski.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/1/6/4916495/malzenstwo_hrabiow_tomasza_andrzeja_adama_i_konstancji_marianny_apoloni_lubienskich_w_rejowcu.pdf See p. 21 for detail of Leon Łubieński. After the collapse of the rebellion in 1831, many Polish exiles sought sanctuary in Britain. One of them was the veteran and inventor, Edward Jełowicki, who took out a patent in London on his Steam turbine.The London Journal of Arts and Sciences, and Repertory of Patent Inventions, Volume 8. 1836 The fall of Warsaw and the arrival of the Poles on British shores prompted poet Thomas Campbell with others to create in 1832 a Literary Association of the Friends of Poland, with the aim of keeping British public opinion informed of Poland's plight. The Association had several regional centres; one of its meetings was addressed by the Polish statesman, Count Adam Jerzy Czartoryski.Żurawski vel Grajewski, Radosław. (1999) Działalność księcia Adama Jerzego Czartoryskiego w Wielkiej Brytanii (1831–1832), Warsaw: "Semper" (A Polish-language account of Adam Jerzy Czartoryski's 1831–32 activism in Great Britain). Czartoryski's permanent representative at the Court of St James's was General Count Władysław Stanisław Zamoyski, who later led a division in the Crimean War on the British side against Russia. Zamoyski's adjutant was another Polish exile, an officer in the 5th Sultan's Cossacks—a Polish cavalry division—Colonel Stanisław Julian Ostroróg.File on Władysław Zamoyski in the Bibliography of the history of Central and East Europe: Władysław Zamoyski – bibliografia osobowa w LitDok Bibliografia Historii Europy Środkowowschodniej, Herder-Institut (Marburg) in Polish, retrieved 1-1-2018 The last official Polish envoy to Britain was the statesman, writer, and futurologist, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1758–1841).