As Brown and Levinson pointed out, politeness is a universal phenomenon, with certain cultural peculiarities, this is what is to be explored in this paper with the help of the collected data. This study is aimed at revealing cross-cultural similarities and discrepancies between British and Hungarian speakers’ request strategies, chiefly with regard to Brown and Levinson’s variables that are held to be responsible for differences in expressions of politeness. The subjects were to react to 8 situations in a discourse completion task. In all of these situations, the variables proposed by Brown and Levinson; social distance, power and the size of imposition were of different extents. The results of the data show a great deal of similarity between British and Hungarian patterns, with only minor variation, confirming Brown and Levinson’s findings, however, the picture seems to be somewhat more varied than they depicted.