The Chain Bridge, one of Budapest’s landmarks, was officially opened on 20 November 1849.
Exactly one hundred years later, on 20 November 1949, the rebuilt Chain Bridge, which had been blown up by the German Wehrmacht during the siege of the capital at the end of the Second World War, was inaugurated.
The Count and his good reasons
The Chain Bridge was the first permanent bridge between the two parts of the city, Buda and Pest. The work was led by a national committee in the 1840s, chaired by the famous aristocrat Count István Széchenyi. Széchenyi wanted to unite Budapest over the bridge and make it the modern capital of a modern Hungary. Apart from his technical and inventive talent, the count had very personal reasons for building the bridge: in the winter of 1820, the Danube was impassable for a week due to drifting ice, which made it impossible for Széchenyi to attend his father’s funeral.
The Hammersmith Bridge as a model
Construction work was delayed again and again for various reasons until the first pile was finally driven into the ground on 28 July 1840. In August 1842, the foundation stone was laid on the Pest side of the bridge, which was planned by the English engineer William Tierney Clark and modelled on the Hammersmith Bridge over the Thames in London. Thousands of piles made of Croatian pine were then driven into the ground with 400 hammer blows per pile, which took around eight hundred workers two years to complete. The piers and bridge walls were completed in July 1847; the iron castings and chains were ordered from England and lifted into place with the help of steam engines, pulleys and rollers on the shore or from floating frames. The bridge was inaugurated on 20 November 1849, just a few months after the defeat of the Hungarian struggle for freedom against the Habsburgs, albeit in a hardly festive atmosphere due to its history.
The choice of location was not adapted to the topography of the Buda side: The bridge ran into the castle hill, which is why the tunnel had to be built in 1857. During reconstruction after the Second World War in 1948/49, the gates of the piers and the ends of the bridge were widened, a pedestrian subway was built at the Buda end and a tram subway at the Pest end.
The end of car traffic
In the spring of 2021, the complete renovation, which had become urgent, began and the renovated Chain Bridge was inaugurated on 4 August 2023. Individual vehicle traffic on the bridge was not allowed again because the new city leadership wants to realise a ‘green’ Budapest.
For bus routes 16 and 105, however, this means free travel across the Chain Bridge, which used to be constantly overloaded at peak times. Today, the buses transport more than 1,600 Budapest residents and their guests across the time-honoured Chain Bridge every hour.
