Budapest: a lesson for us all

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.

Marlow: douze points

Working on the absolutely final revision, the third so far, of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, I thought it would be revealing to put some of its ideas to the test. “Tourist” is my projected book on “the subjective geography of everyday life” (a wider take on the subject than ‘psychogeography’ as commonly understood). So last weekend, coincidentally the weekend of the awesomely imbecilic Eurination contest, I visited somewhere “new”, to see how some of the principles played out.

The town in question was Marlow, on the north bank of the River Thames, in Buckinghamshire. I’d visited it three or four times previously, very briefly, and mostly while on my long distance saunter along the Thames Path in stages from Goring Gap to Westminster, but this was the first time I’d actually stayed there. What happened, as so often, was that I completely failed to explore Marlow, but used it as a base for visiting places nearby. However, I can report several observations.

Part of the town, especially that towards the railway station, looks slightly miniaturised, like a 75 per cent scale model. The houses are low and squat, the roads and pavements unnaturally narrow, so that neither cars nor pedestrians (all of normal dimensions, as far as I could tell) are well catered for. The street map I had printed off prior to the visit showed the thoroughfares as being narrow, but I assumed that was just a cartographic anomaly. Not so; they really are. So, this was a noticeable first impression, not an outstanding feature overall in the greater scheme of things, or Marlow in particular, but a comment-worthy one. In terms of the subjective appreciation of places, first impressions are important.

Another interesting aspect of subjective geography consists of those things that the locals no longer notice because they’re so all-pervasive. Well, perhaps they do, but what struck me as an outsider was the constant aircraft noise from the flightpath out of Heathrow, the ambient roar of traffic on the bypass, the sight of red kites soaring and wheeling and swooping, the cheerful bunting across the High Street and, it has to be said, the friendliness of everyone.

Hereness and thereness are important subjective geographical qualities. We’ll skip hereness, as in this context it’s a little pretentious. Thereness, though, is more interesting, can be manifested in several ways, and helps to contextualise places. One artificial technique for enhancing thereness is official twinning. I failed to notice where Marlow is twinned with but, most unusually, it is “bridged” with a major European capital. Marlow bridge, the suspension bridge across the Thames, was designed by William Tierney Clark, who was also responsible for the design of the very similar though larger Széchenyi chain bridge - built by Scottish engineer Adam Clark (no relation) between 1839 and 1849 - which spans the Danube in central Budapest in a single 1,250 feet span. A plaque on the Marlow bridge commemorates the “bridging” of the town with Budapest. I don’t know if there is a similar plaque in the Hungarian capital, but I hope to find out later this summer.

Orientation: absolutely no problem finding my way around, but some intriguing dog-leggy passages near the weir.

The weir: weird.

Cultural associations: Mole, Ratty, Badger, Mr. Toad. There may be others.

Unusual names: Higginson Park, the sort of name that should be Oop North rather than in the Home Counties, but a delight all the same.

Adjacent places: Henley, Bourne End, Cliveden. Disappointed that ye Cliveden gifte shoppe didn’t sell replicas of that chair. After all, it is the half-centenary this year.

Overall verdict on Marlow: a thoroughly nice place and I must look at it properly next time. Forget Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ruritania, Outer Slobodia and other back-of-beyond Euro-dribbles: this one is truly worthy of douze points.