Uralmash

A few metro stops north of the centre is the constructivist company town built in the early 1930s for workers at the Uralmash heavy machinery plant. The street plan — radiating avenues converging on the factory gate — is itself an artefact of Soviet planning, and many of the original 1930s apartment buildings, club houses and a vast white House of Culture survive.

It is not a polished tourist district, but for those interested in Soviet architecture and the social history that produced it, Uralmash is unmissable. Take the metro to the station of the same name and walk the main avenues from there.

things to do neighbourhood
A story
Uralmash — short for Ural Machine-Building Plant — was a model Soviet industrial district designed in the 1930s around a single mega-factory. In the 1990s the same blocks became infamous as the base of the Uralmashevskaya organised-crime group, one of the most powerful in post-Soviet Russia. The district is still working-class, still gritty, and increasingly photographed by architecture tourists.

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