In the canon of worthies and busybodies that keep provincial England turning, Margaret Thatcher’s father, Alfred Roberts, stands supreme. Not only was he Grantham’s grocer, mayor and what we would now call subpostmaster. He was also a town councillor, sitting as an “Independent Ratepayer”, and was eventually granted the honorific of alderman for the East Midlands town. He was chairman of the library committee, governor of both the town’s secondary schools and founder of the Grantham Rotary. And he took his charity home: in the hungry Thirties, he ran a shopfloor food bank, slipping extra loaves to needy customers under the guise of leftovers from “a big bake”.
During the war, he didn’t stop. He served as chief air-raid welfare officer, founded a “British Restaurant” to produce extra food in rationed times and became a prominent figure in the national savings movement. But above all he was a man of God. Roberts and his family attended church three or four times a day on Sundays. He kept the sabbath, forbidding his children from dancing or even playing Snakes and Ladders, and preached at the local Methodist chapel (“We must avoid the principle of a Denominational Closed Shop,” the father of Thatcher thundered in one sermon).
And while Roberts gave his customers charity, he never gave them credit. A family friend recalled Roberts as “one who didn’t unbend”. We all know Thatcher’s 1981 line that “economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul”. But philosophy becomes theology when we recall this gloss from 1978: “We are Methodists, and Methodism means method.” Auberon Waugh had another phrase for it: “salvation through greed”. But that’s not how the grocer’s daughter saw it. In her mind, and the minds of those around her, Grantham was her foundation, her Bethlehem. “She came from Grantham with her mind made up,” Alfred Sherman once said. “She brought Grantham with her.”
I’ve come to Grantham to find both what Thatcher brought with her and what she left behind. It is Alderman Roberts’s modern representative I meet on a mild Friday morning outside of Grantham’s Guildhall. He is wearing a stainless-steel moustache, a Windsor-knotted tie and the same spectacle frames as Geoffrey Howe. He is John Manterfield – Grantham grammar-school boy, chairman of the Grantham Civic Society, housing campaigner, and local historian (author of a study of the town’s most famous son, Newton’s Grantham). But we’re here for Grantham’s most famous daughter. For the centenary of Mrs Thatcher’s birth, part of the town’s commemoratory “Thatcher Fest”, Manterfield is leading me and a dozen locals on a tour of her town.
Grantham is found in a shallow bowl, where Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire and the Great North Road once met. (“My first distinct memory is of traffic,” Thatcher’s memoirs begin, and she’s right: the place remains a tangle of roundabouts, rat-runs and pelican crossings.) Corner by street corner, you find Georgian, Victorian, the Sixties and now. So, yes, the kebab shops, the phone shops and traditional Thai massage. But then also the tea rooms, the almshouses and the sun-bleached advert for “English leather” lingering on side-street brickwork. The town breathes a quiet conservatism. Unlike so much of urban England now, there are very few flags – British, English, Ukrainian or Palestinian. But in the second week of October, the very first lapel poppies are coming out.
First to the Guildhall and the mayor’s parlour. It’s thickly carpeted with the chequered blue and yellow crest of Grantham, and stuffed with civic memorabilia: medals, pictures of war planes, a medieval halberd. There are photographs of Thatcher, and her father, and his name is carved on to the seriffed list of mayors. Manterfield tells us that, though it has its problems with shuttered shops and so on, Grantham remains a “very pleasant place to live, for those of us who live here”. And from here we march uphill along the route Margaret once took to the school she attended, Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. In the hall, there’s a baby grand piano, several “outstanding” Ofsted certificates and the honours board. This time it’s Thatcher’s turn (Margaret Roberts, head girl, 1942/43), though John also points out his aunt, Eunice, shared the same post. Our “town is well served” by the school, he nods.
The group is full of civic pride. John knows how many Granthamites commute to London each day (700), the boundaries between parish and borough and which Grantham church Simon Jenkins judged to have “the finest steeple in England”. I hear about the RiverCare group, which patrols and cleans the winding Witham. Lynn Robinson, a fellow committee member of the Grantham Civic Society, tells me how she knits purple poppies for the Royal British Legion to commemorate animals lost in war. Rosemary, whose parents worshipped at the same church as Alfred Roberts and his family, is staging a play for Thatcher Fest, “Living over the Shop”, a sort of nativity of her family’s life.
But there were some true Thatcherites within the group. I fall into step with Danny, who lives just behind the Guildhall. He was born in Belfast but joined the army in 1968, aged 16. It took him to Taunton and then to Hamburg and Hong Kong. But ultimately, it stationed him at Prince William of Gloucester barracks in Grantham, where he stayed. Thatcher “gave us a good old shake”, he tells me, and “a lot of dead wood fell out” even if some good things were lost. But he admired Thatcher while he was in the army in the Eighties, and he’s still a Conservative. He almost met her once: when she came to sign copies of her memoirs at Grantham Guildhall, and he got within four places of Mrs T’s desk. What would he have said to her? “Well done, ma’am” or “Go girl!”
We walk back into the Grantham bowl, and towards 1 North Parade, the shop Alfred Roberts bought in 1919, and above which Margaret Thatcher was born and lived. It still stands, a squat redbrick on the corner of a busy road. John shows us one of Alfred’s original adverts for the shop: “The quality of our provisions STANDS SUPREME.” But, beyond a plaque and a few notices inside, there’s little of Thatcher here. Foodstuff and sundries are now taken care of by the nearby Asda superstore, and the Robertses’ premises are occupied by the Living Health Chiropractic Clinic. It advertises health, beauty and massage services, including “lymphatic massage using cooling crystal wands” and the “St Tropez spray tan”.
It’s the first time modern Britain intrudes, but not the last. I ask Danny how the town has changed, and he talks about immigration. It seems to have settled down now, he says, but there was a time when “you couldn’t walk down the street without hearing another language being spoken”. He also mentions shops selling illegal cigarettes and the proliferation of Turkish barbershops. He points to a shop called “Stop Mini Market”, one of those strange corner shops that seems to stock very little except every variety of vape. (This isn’t paranoia: Lincolnshire County Council recently seized 120,000 illegal cigarettes, including some from the “Stop Mini Market”.) That isn’t all. Crossing a footbridge over the River Witham, a local points out the brown trout in the water. As promised, there are several partly camouflaged foot-long shapes. Unprompted, the same man tells me that immigrants to the town steal fish to eat, forcing locals to replace them.
Although a conservative town, Conservatism is slipping away from Grantham. In the Grantham Journal, I read that a former Grantham mayor, Mark Whittington, has defected to Reform, saying the Tories are “over”. And, as the sun sets, I chat to people passing Grantham’s Margaret Thatcher statue, which was installed in 2022 – and egged within two hours. The statue depicts the baroness that the grocer’s daughter became: robed, baronial, glaring kestrel-like, as though Jim Prior has just presented some disappointing employment figures. One woman is proud of the statue and Thatcher, who “did a lot for the forces”. She still calls herself a Conservative but she says “Bane-dock or whoever it is” isn’t carrying Thatcher’s banner. “It’s Farage,” she says. Another told me Thatcher “left the country in a better state than she found it” though it did “hit rock bottom when she was in power”. He voted Ukip, Tory and Reform at the last few elections, and says Farage is Thatcher’s heir.
There is a darker though equally Thatcherite story to tell about Grantham too. Some of this is historical: John Manterfield says the town is divided over her legacy, not least because constables were stationed in the local barracks during the miners’ strike, ready to strike north to Yorkshire. But it runs into the present. In the pub nearest the statue – the merry and low-ceilinged Tollemache Inn – I talk to some old boys about the town. Thatcher was “alright”, one says, and talks about the Falklands War. But another says the place is “in decline”. “We used to be Great Britain,” he says: “that’s what’s stamped on my behind. ‘UK’ – where did that come from?” They mention old firms like Aveling-Barford, which used to sell heavy machinery across the globe. Now that’s all gone, and with all the “brothers and sisters” coming across the Channel, “local natives” can’t get good jobs, all while we send money abroad in overseas aid.
Thatcher’s Grantham is a myth. She rarely returned to the town after she left for Oxford in 1943, and her father’s postwar letters are full of whimpers at her neglect of him. And, rather than local groceries, any assessment of her political success must account for two developments in the global crude market: her husband Denis Thatcher’s work for Castrol and then on the board of Burmah Oil, giving the couple personal financial security, and the pumping of the North Sea, supporting sterling and the British economy through her fiscal programme. The new capitalism of the Eighties was never especially Christian. “I cut taxes as I thought it would generate a giving society,” she said some years after leaving office. “It didn’t.”
Nonetheless, in Thatcher’s mind, and the minds of her followers, the temper and ambitions of Thatcherism were forged in Grantham – the mean, mode and median of Middle England. She never forgot the shopkeepers. Campaigning during the 2001 election in a Northampton market square, she hollered at the surrounding camera crews: “We must get away, we’re affecting their profits!” If Thatcherism had a symbolic goal, it was to terraform the United Kingdom into a massive small market town (no matter that its actual architectural legacies are Canary Wharf at one end and the hollow quarries of South Yorkshire at the other).
But the market town is dissolving too. You can find Thatcher’s heirs and her victims in Grantham. They’re one and the same. Because while it was an organic community that shaped her, a town “where everyone knew everyone else”, as she once said, it took the morose and resentful politics of the Seventies to sweep her to power. The same mood is among us again. All it needs to do is find its Thatcher – if it hasn’t already.
[Further reading: What did Mrs Thatcher do to us?]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor