The Gresham Palace

Right across from the end of the Chain Bridge stands a palace that was paid for with English insurance money. The Gresham Life Assurance Company of London bought up the old Nákó house here, had it torn down, and poured around three million crowns into a new headquarters, named after Thomas Gresham, the financier who founded the London stock exchange back in the sixteenth century. Zsigmond Quittner and the Vágó brothers built it between 1904 and 1906, bringing in the finest Hungarian craftsmen along the way: glass by Miksa Róth, ceramics by Zsolnay, and from Gyula Jungfer the wrought-iron gate with the peacocks that you still walk under today. Hearts are carved into the facade everywhere, and that is where the building gets its Budapest nickname: the palace of hearts.

Halfway through the twenties the insurer packed up and left Hungary. After the war the building was nationalised and the grand apartments were carved up into small flats for several families at once, after which it spent forty years rotting away on the loveliest spot in the city. Only in 1999 did an investor buy it, and since 2004 it has housed a hotel with a hundred and seventy-nine rooms.

We cross the square towards the river and follow the embankment further south.