Explore Budapest in Google Street View

Budapest was three separate towns until 1873. Buda and Obuda on the hilly west bank and Pest on the flat east bank were merged into one city, and a century and a half later they have still not blended. Street View makes the split obvious in a way a map cannot: cross any bridge and the gradient, the street width and the age of the buildings all change at once.

Pest is the half most people picture. It is flat, it was largely built in a rush between 1870 and 1900 when the city was growing faster than almost anywhere in Europe, and it is laid out on a system of ring roads and radial avenues borrowed from Vienna and Paris. The result is block after block of tall apartment buildings with courtyards inside them, most of which were never demolished and many of which still carry damage from 1945 and 1956.

Buda is older, steeper and quieter. The Castle District sits on a plateau above the river with medieval street patterns underneath rebuilt baroque frontages, and the whole hill is riddled with caves and cellars that were joined into a tunnel system. Getting up there in Street View means the roads, the funicular line, or the staircases, several of which were captured on foot.

The bridges are the point of the city and each one is worth crossing. The Chain Bridge, finished in 1849, was the first permanent crossing and the thing that made a single city possible at all. The Liberty Bridge is green ironwork with mythical birds on the top of each pillar, and it is closed to cars on some summer weekends and filled with people sitting on the tram tracks, which some of the imagery has caught.

For the interior of the city, Andrassy Avenue is the axis and it runs dead straight for two and a half kilometres from the centre to Heroes' Square. Underneath it is the oldest underground railway in continental Europe, opened in 1896, with stations so shallow that the staircases down to them are short and the platforms feel like basements. The avenue itself gets progressively grander and more residential as you go out.

The Jewish Quarter in District VII is the part that repays slow movement. It is dense, low and full of courtyards, and it contains both the largest synagogue in Europe and the ruin bars, which are derelict buildings occupied and filled with salvaged furniture rather than renovated. Szimpla Kert was the first and is on Kazinczy Street. Much of the district is narrow enough that the imagery was shot tight against the buildings.