Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

play on the field of the Elektromos club in the forties. (It was here, in Latorca utca, that the construction of an exceptionally fine sports complex had been begun in 1926. The resulting stadium, which was Hungary’s first electrically lit facility, survived the siege without sustaining any serious damages.)

In the fifties Vasas played its home games in the People’s Park, in the People’s Stadium and, from the end of the decade, in Béke utca. The stadium, now accessible from Fáy utca, was given its present appearance between 1971 and 1973 and was equipped with electric lighting in 1976. The complex includes a sports hall built in 1976 as well as several handball and football fields. The sports complex raised on the plot inherited from BBTE in Pasarét and the tennis court in the same location are also in the management of Vasas, as is the sports hall in Folyondár utca in Óbuda.

The outlying districts

The goals with tattered nets, the clay and sand covered football pitches on windswept outskirts, familiar from Pál Sándor’s film Old Times’ Soccer, have started to decay in the course of their decades-long existence. Football fields on Lehel út, Amerikai út, Liget utca, Halom utca, Berlini utca, Bihar utca, Öv utca, Mező utca, Attila utca and Fehér út once hosted first-division games, but today there is perhaps nobody left to recall the memory of their old glory. Yet some of these faraway sports grounds are in use to this day.

Újpest Gymnastics Association (GTE)

(No. 13 Megyeri út, district IV)

The football players of the LITE club had all but driven players of rounders away from the People’s Island when, in early 1900, they changed their mind and took out a lease from Count László Károlyi on the field of the cotton factory in Újpest, where they had set up a makeshift pitch by April the same year. As this crude facility could not, however, be authorised, LITE returned to the People’s Island in the spring of 1903, and played its games on the field there until 1922. In 1910 the

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