Janie Nicoll looks back on her experience of High Rise living in Budapest

High Rise living can take many shapes and forms and affects different people in different ways depending on situation and expectation. My experience as a foreign student in an isolated location gave me food for thought, but is something I can put down to experience or “life’s rich tapestry”.


“A place where history is ever present, and the past and the future are colliding at a frantic pace.”

“While there is strife there is hope“

I first visited Budapest, Hungary as a tourist in Spring 1990, with an art college lecturer, Iain Paterson, an Eastern European enthusiast with many trips under his belt and contacts in a variety of countries, not widely accessible due to the restrictions of the Iron Curtain.

In October of that year I returned there, for a one year Overseas Postgraduate Scholarship through the British Council, and the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. Although I had been offered a room in the house of a family I already new and would have liked to have stayed with, (and who would have appreciated the cultural links and the cash), the Ministry of Culture had allocated me a flat on my own on the tenth floor of a tower block in Angyalföld, a housing estate in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, close to the Danube River. There was no arguing with the Ministry of Culture and so I set up home at the top of my tower block.

It was the first time I had lived entirely on my own and to start with I quite enjoyed having my own place consisting of a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. To the average Hungarian family, where generations of the same family crammed together, this would have seemed like a huge amount of space for one person. I enjoyed shopping in the local supermarket and filling the cupboards with items packaged in the restricted range of screenprinted colours. I had a TV set that miraculously tuned into MTV but to no other Western Channels, and there was no phone, only an intercom to the ground floor. I remember catching the odd glimpse of my neighbours, in the hallways or in the lifts, but I never visited anyone or got to know anyone. There seemed to be a lot of old ladies who spent a lot of time staring out of their windows.

Living in this lofty position gave me an overview of the city and the pollution that hung over it.

“There’s a blue sky above but a grey haze hangs over the city, and by the time it reaches the ground it’s a dull lilac morass. Carbon monoxide, lead and Lord knows what else, belched out by the factories surrounding the city and every car that passes through, where it congregates and is sucked up by every human being, as they walk in the street, as they live in their homes. It is in all the air we breathe, inescapable, insurmountable... damaging our brains, and our lungs, leaving their merciless deposits, ventricles, alveoli, insidious to our existence. We all live with it, the stale water, grimy clothes, the coughing and spluttering of an unhealthy community….”

Barely able to speak the language, dislocated from family, friends, everything I was used to and not knowing anyone for miles around, I look back with a strong sense of my own isolation, both physically, and culturally. My diaries are filled with writings that reassessed my life, my approach to making art, my place in the world, my motivations, pretty much my whole existence. Having spent the previous six years within the nurturing context of an art school education, whatever followed was bound to be a wake up call to the realities of real life, to go abroad and do it on my own was bound to be a baptism by fire, maybe that’s why I went there in the first place.

Within a couple of months I hooked up with a couple of other British students, who also had difficult accommodation scenarios, and together we managed to make a case for the Ministry to allow us to get a flat together. We moved into a centrally located apartment, still cramped but quite grand, one of the first privately rented flats in the city, and life changed tempo once again.

I had enjoyed my lofty view while it had lasted, but it was good to be back in the thick of things.