Marek Gajewski

My trade in Poland had been in wallpapering and tiling but after the collapse of Communism, work and money became scarce. There were three of us who travelled to England looking for work and a better life, but I was the only one who stayed.

I started out being employed by a Polish man, who didn’t pay my wages. I began working directly for one of his clients and they passed me onto their circle of friends in west London.

Life was hard, however, during the recession of the early 1990s. I was sending money to my wife and two young daughters back home in Poland. I didn’t advertise much; I knew about 20 Polish men who were deported for working in the UK illegally.

Gradually the business grew and I put together a team of eight men working for me – painters, decorators, carpenters, electricians and plumbers – and we took on bigger and bigger jobs all over London renovating homes.

I liked to work with Polish colleagues as we could speak the same language and shared our culture. I also found them to be much harder workers than people from other nationalities. After Poland joined the EU in 2004 my business began to go downhill – thousands of Polish workers came to the UK and they drove down the price of labour and quality of work.

Often my team and I would be called in to fix a terrible job done by a bunch of ‘cowboys’ – from Poland and from other countries too.

Nowadays I prefer to take on smaller jobs and to work on my own. After Brexit it has been harder for me to find good Polish workers; many of them went back home as they no longer saw a future or a welcome for themselves in Britain.

It’s difficult to find capable, willing workers from the younger generation – they expect everything to be done for them. There’s something about the hardships and difficulties that my generation faced when we arrived that has made us much tougher and more resilient.

Image courtesy Marek Gajewski