Not motoring
Driven underground
Gavin Stamp
Which European city built the first underground railway on the Continent? Paris? Vienna? Berlin? No. Budapest, sur- prising as it may seem. The line was planned in 1894 and was built by cut and cover along the length of Andrassy Ut — the long, long straight boulevard named after Hungary's great 19th-century prime minister — and laid out in the 1870s. And so, in 1896, the first electric trains could run from the old centre of Pest out to the city's park where the great Millennium exhibition was being held to celebrate 1,000 years (on and oft) of the Kingdom of Hun- gary. Today, what that original line looked like can be seen in the little museum hid- den away in Deak Square station: a short by-passed stretch of line complete with original carriages.
Budapest is a most extraordinary city: extraordinary because it grew so rapidly from a provincial town (or towns) to one of the great metropolises of Europe and the capital of a revived Kingdom of Hungary established by the 'Compromise' with Aus- tria of 1867. In 1873, when they were for- mally united, Buda and Pest were two towns on either side of the Danube then connected only by the handsome chain bridge designed by a pair of Scots: William Tierney Clark and Adam Clark. By 1914 and the outbreak of the war that brought Hungary's 'Golden Age' to a dramatic and undeserved end, Buda-Pest was a city with a population approaching a million, orna- mented by an astonishing number of great public buildings and with its own electric find this work truly fulfilling in many ways – there's the exercise, the sense of accomplishment, and, most important the opportunity to make lots of noise.' underground and tramway system. Chicago grew as fast, and in the same period, but Budapest managed its expansion with impressive coherence, and quality.
There are many good reasons for visiting Budapest today. One is the architecture. There arc an astonishing number of ambi- tious public buildings which compete with those of London and Vienna in scale and make those in Glasgow look provincial; most famous, perhaps, is the domed Gothic Revival parliament building, a distant rela- tion of and compliment to Barry and Pugin's palace on the Thames. And then there are the many remarkable buildings designed in a local, nationalist expression of l'art nouveau — buildings of rough stone and stucco, encrusted with sculpture and ceramic ornament, and given fantastic wob- bly curvaceous forms — as if designed by a more restrained Gaudi. Budapest ought to rank with Barcelona, Glasgow and Riga as one of the Art Nouveau cities of Europe.
Another attraction — at least as far as this column is concerned — is the public transport. The system is comprehensive, most efficient and rather enjoyable. There are trains, of course, both main line and suburban, many running from the 19th cen- tury and now being restored — one with its iron train shed signed by Eiffel of Paris. As in any civilised city, there are trams — lots of them: three-car yellow vehicles which glide through all the main streets. There are buses and, much better, trolley-buses, those clean, quiet and sensible urban vehi- cles which London so foolishly dispensed with — like so much else. And there is the Metro.
That original, pioneering line has now been joined by two others, both built since the war and both using those wide Soviet- made cars which are also to be found in Prague and elsewhere. Both lines also still manifest that incomprehensible absence of logical signposting which a Londoner takes for granted and which was such a feature of the old Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is still possible to have a taste of the old Iron Cur- tain in Budapest, especially in Moszkva ter — Moscow Square — where a typical, flashy and now down-at-heel 1960s building is surrounded by tram lines and by vaguely sinister low life while the Metro line below is immensely deep and reached by Soviet- style interminably long escalators. And, needless to say, this line was not just built to benefit the travelling public of Hungary: it was also designed at the height of the Cold War to serve as a nuclear bomb shelter.
But Hungary has changed, and is chang- ing fast. After a long dark night, this most cosmopolitan city is returning to normal. One sign of this is the excessive but still growing number of private cars, mostly parked inconveniently on the pavements. Citizens already complain that the public transport is not what it was, and it would be very sad if Budapest follows Britain and America in foolishly running down an excellent (and cheap) system. I can only hope that the Hungarians have more sense. But the tram system reached its peak in 1967 and has been contracting ever since, which merely goes to show that Late Com- munism was as blinkered as Late Capital- ism in concentrating on the needs of the car.
However, some of the curiosities of Budapest's public transport would seem to have little economic justification, fun as they are. One is the funicular railway which rises from near the centre of the city to the top of Szechenyi Hill. And from here the traveller can descend by a different route on the so-called Pioneers' Railway, a nar- row gauge line that winds its way down through an open landscape. Incredibly, it was built in 1948-50 by Pioneers, or, rather, teenage children. And if a Pioneer did par- ticularly well at school he (or she?) was allowed to work on this railway as a privi- lege and a treat. Is there a useful notion here that our own Secretary of State for Education might consider adopting?
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