Dreamland on the Danube

Twenty years ago, a traveller wandering the streets of downtown Budapest would have found himself among silent, brooding walls of once-magnificent but sorely neglected, late-19th century apartment blocks; their art nouveau flourishes damaged by war or barely visible under the grime, their residents mainly elderly, waiting out their time.
Catherine Dickens-Gore; Budapest’s parliament building overlooking the Danube; professor Mark Andrews
Country seat: above, Catherine Dickens-Gore in the heart of the city where she has made her home. Top right, Budapest’s parliament building overlooking the Danube; above right, university professor Mark Andrews points out his Castle Hill apartment

That same traveller wandering those same streets today would find a city transformed. The grand apartments are again humming with life, occupied by a cross-section of wealthier Hungarian families, executives from Western firms and children of Hungarian intelligentsia or aristocracy who had previously fled the Communist regime.

"Downtown has completely changed," says Tamas Mehlhoffer, who writes about property for local firm Bookmark Media. "Now, we've got a lot of restored historical buildings, and people who can afford it want to live near the river."

It is easy to see why. Of all the central European capitals, Budapest largely escaped the monolithic redevelopment that Communism usually bestowed on its cities in the mistaken belief that paradise could be made out of concrete. Its late-19th century and art nouveau architecture may have been badly neglected, but it was not destroyed.

And then there's the location on the Danube. The city has earned Unesco World Heritage status for its views, with the hills of Buda on the right bank looking down on the lowlands of Pest on the left. Meanwhile, its inexpensive accommodation (a third of the prices in Vienna) have made it attractive to companies keen to do business in the emerging European markets.
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Among the new residents is Catherine Dickens, the great great great granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Catherine grew up in Yorkshire and, at first sight, seems as English as they come. Yet her mother is Countess Jeanne-Marie Wenckheim-Teleki, from the eastern Hungarian village of Doboz.

The countess lost her parents in the Second World War and fled to London as a teenage refugee. She met and married Christopher Charles Dickens, head of the Dickens dynasty. In the late 1990s, after her husband's death, she returned to Hungary, and her daughter Catherine used to come to visit.

It was on one of these visits, out horse-riding with her mother, that Catherine decided she too wanted to live in Hungary. By that time she was in her thirties, recently divorced after her first marriage had come to grief in the West Indies, and she had no desire to return to Britain. "I am half Hungarian, and this seemed to me a land of opportunity. So I invested in a property here - paying £130,000 in 2001 for a Budapest apartment of 180 square metres." That apartment is now worth £300,000.

Once Catherine had made that decision, her life changed radically. In a corner shop near her apartment in downtown Pest, she met Englishman Christopher Gore, who had arrived in Budapest in the post-1989 euphoria to set up an insurance business. It was Christopher who encouraged her to direct her considerable energy into a business of her own, buying and renovating some of the city's wonderful, high-ceilinged and parquet-floored apartments.

This she now does with flair and enthusiasm, acting for British and Irish investors. The properties she finds and renovates are immediately let and her investors get a yield of at least 7 per cent.

For Catherine, now Dickens-Gore, buying that first flat in Budapest has been a springboard to a new existence. She and her husband

now have a three-year-old daughter, Meg, whose Hungarian is better than her English, and at the weekends they retreat to their rural properties i