It was liberating last week to arrive in a “new” city, one
that I had been looking forward to for a long time, and to see how it fared
with respect to some of the principles of subjective geography that I have been
describing in recent blogs, and which feature in “Tourist In Your Own Town”.
Budapest enjoys a strong sense of place, due in no small way
to its location at the point where the Danube breaks free from the hills to the
north and enters the great flat Hungarian plain. It celebrates its mighty river
and makes the most of it, the same mythic Blue Danube which its upstream
neighbour Vienna so churlishly turns its back on, to its loss, and which last
week – after a long period of heavy rains – was greyish-green in colour,
swollen, littered with uprooted trees, and flowing fast. As the capital of a country
with a language that offers few clues to a non-speaker I was surprised at how
easy Budapest was to use, at its eagerness to adopt Western values, and at the
frequency and competence with which English was spoken. I found the city
welcoming and friendly, fun to be in. It’s somewhere that wants to have a good
time and knows how to go about it.
First impressions, when arriving at Keleti station off the
RailJet from Vienna, were of a frisson of “foreignness”, of Eastern
Europeanness, a feeling exacerbated by the presence of dodgy-looking taxi touts
and of the disorder caused by the closure of the main station frontage and its surrounding
by construction works for metro Line 4. The strangeness quickly dissipated upon
approaching the city centre, and I soon realised I was in one of the great European capitals.
Pest includes the commercial heart of the city, while Buda
is more relaxed and touristy, with features reflecting a long history.
Subjectively, there is no obvious single central place, although conventionally
it would be Deák Ferenc Square, where the three metro lines intersect, a
location marked by a big wheel and a tourist information office. However, there
is a considerable surrounding area where one feels a strong sense of being
close to the centre of things. The Danube acts as a focus through the central
area, especially in the vicinity of the chain bridge, near where tour guides
congregate.
Navigability is easy, aided on the Pest side of the Danube by
broad radial avenues and roughly semicircular connectors, and sometimes by
views towards the river and the hills to the west, and on the Buda side by the
very obvious topographies of the castle area and of Gellert hill. Many parts of
the central city provide a satisfying sense of enclosure, with a high
information content in terms of street furniture and activity, the visual and
aural effects of the ubiquitous yellow trams, a solid, chunky, dense and
stylish urbanity, yet with a skyline free from the visual blight of ugly modern
highrise that disfigures so many cities, not least London. Budapest is a city
that enjoys itself, knows what it has got, appreciates it and – one hopes –
doesn’t want to spoil it by pursuing the dreary diktats of “progress”, as
understood by egotistical architects, unimaginative financiers and corporate drones.
In terms of subjective similarity to other places, Paris is the most obvious
candidate, surely not a bad thing. Many of the major thoroughfares are
treelined; the variety in the detail of the vernacular architecture is
astonishing.
In an earlier blog I commented on the plaque on the bridge
across the Thames at Marlow which declares – in English and Magyar – how that
Buckinghamshire town is “bridged” with Budapest, thanks to the work of William
Tierney Clark and his (unrelated) successor Adam Clark. I was hoping to find a
plaque on the Szchenyi chain bridge across the Danube referring to Marlow but,
despite the difficulty of deciphering the inscription in Hungarian at the south
western corner of the bridge, I don’t think Marlow gets a mention, although
both Clarks are cited. But it’s a such a lovely bridge that I attach a
photograph.
Finally, I encountered something so strange and wonderful
that afterwards I wondered if I had dreamt it. Having explored the delightful
city park in the north east of the city I took Line 1 of the metro downtown.
This is the Földalatti, the line dating from the 1890s, the first such system
in continental Europe. The station at Hösök tere, aka Heroes’ Square, adjacent
to the city park, really is the stuff of dreams, and consequently my
description may be a little exaggerated or distorted. Entering the station via
a stairwell I went to a tardis-like kiosk and bought a block of tickets, the
size of one’s little finger, and had to validate one in a machine, under the
eye of guards, before entering the platform area proper which – surreally –
appeared not much larger than your average bathmat. The train was already in,
and seemed to have a capacity for about eight people, all of them tourists. I’m
sure this can’t really be true. At each beautifully tiled station, door-closing
and departure were announced by an elaborate sequence of chimes. The whole
experience was a dreamlike delight.
However, it occurred
to me later that much of the line follows the route of Andrassy Street, the
straight radial sometimes compared (unreasonably) with the Champs Elysées, and
therefore must run close to the hideous basement of Number 60, the House of
Terror. Here, the crimes of the Nazi and the Soviet occupiers are recorded in
grim detail, along with some of the more gruesome artefacts of repression, and offer
a stern message applicable to this day to all those – businessmen and
politicians in particular - who toady to nasty regimes that still practise
exactly the same kinds of thing. Budapest has found its freedom, values and
enjoys it, and understands how precious it is. We should take note.
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