Juhász Gyula - Szántó András: Hotels - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

The Britannia’s garage

the basement rooms of the hotel. The murals depicting historical scenes, the stained glass windows, the clinker wall-covering and the leather-backed chairs exuded “some kind of rural atmosphere”. Novelist Ferenc Móra spoke of the Britannia as his second home. Soon enough, a room named for the writer was added to the establishment.

Inscribed into the scorched wooden panelling ornamented with folk motifs and illustrated with painter Jenő Haranghy’s colour pen-and-ink drawings were twelve quotations from Mora’s works. It was here, too, that a portrait of the writer painted on glass was exhibited.

In the mid-thirties, the elimination of a number of shops on the street front left sufficient space for the opening of a café. The walls of this were decorated with Jenő Haranghy’s tapestries.

Opening a cellar underneath a neighbouring building in Szondi utca, the proprietor built Budapest’s first underground hotel garage, accommodating thirty cars. By 1937 an impressive dome-topped hall with a capacity of five hundred persons had been created. This was of particular significance due to the fact that when the banqueting hall of the Hotel Royal was converted into a cinema, there were hardly any halls in Pest of a similar size where large-scale events could be held. The walls between marble fire-places purchased at auctions from aristocratic palaces were decorated with Shakespearean illustrations by Haranghy. (No wonder the hotel was jokingly referred to as the Haranghy museum!)The lighting of the glass dance floor also lit the garage underneath.

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