Sala BHP, Gdańsk

Sala BHP is a historic building within the Gdańsk Shipyard, and it is where the August Agreements were signed in nineteen eighty. Built as a torpedo warehouse for the Imperial Shipyard around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became a training venue for shipyard workers on the thirteenth of December nineteen sixty-one. During the strike movement of nineteen eighty, the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee held its deliberations here.

On the thirty-first of August, the agreements signed in this hall ended the events of that August. Let the preserved presiding table draw your attention: the committee met around it. It is made from smaller tables, each measuring two hundred by eighty-eight centimetres, produced in the Gdańsk Shipyard carpentry workshop.

The hall and Solidarity Square entered the heritage register in nineteen ninety-nine. Solidarity, the independent self-governing trade union, became the owner on the twenty-third of December two thousand four, and a museum opened here on the twenty-fourth of August two thousand ten. This plain shipyard interior became a room where workers’ demands took physical, public form.