Above a corner shop on North Parade, in a flat over the family grocery, Margaret Roberts was born in 1925. Her father Alfred was a lay Methodist preacher and a councillor who became mayor; her mother kept the books. The shop sold tea, sugar, bacon, and other necessaries. The future Mrs Thatcher walked downstairs to school each morning at Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School, won a place at Oxford to read chemistry, and never came back to live. Grantham has a complicated relationship with its most famous daughter. A statue erected on St Peter's Hill in 2022 was attacked with eggs within two hours of its unveiling and has been vandalised four times since. Whatever you think of her politics, the small-town Methodist daughter of a corner-shop grocer rising to become the first woman to lead a major Western democracy is a story that began in this quiet Lincolnshire town with a stained-glass shopfront.

A century before Margaret Thatcher, another grammar-school child sat in a classroom at the King's School here. Isaac Newton was a country boy from Woolsthorpe Manor, a few miles south, and he was, his masters said, idle. He carved his name into a windowsill. The windowsill is still there, the marks of his pen-knife now in a glass case. A century after Newton, Thomas Paine took a job in Grantham as an excise officer - a tax inspector - while he was still learning to write the pamphlets that would topple a king. And in 1740, a baker called William Eggleston was working in a dim kitchen on the Great North Road when he mistook one ingredient for another and pulled out of his oven, instead of the dense whetstone biscuits he was making for coachmen, a domed light hollow biscuit with a crackled surface and a delicate ginger flavour. Grantham Gingerbread became famous. It is still made. It is still hollow in the middle. Coach drivers stopping to change horses on the King's North Road would buy it by the bag.

By 1892, the engineering firm of Richard Hornsby & Sons in Spittlegate had built and run the first working diesel engine, four years before Rudolf Diesel had built his. The principle - ignition by compression alone, without spark - was the work of a Yorkshireman called Herbert Akroyd Stuart, and the Grantham engine ran continuously for six hours. Three years later, Hornsby's invented a caterpillar track. They sold the patent to the Holt Manufacturing Company of California for four thousand pounds; Holt eventually became Caterpillar Inc. During the Second World War, the same Grantham factories built Matilda tanks. RAF Bomber Command's No. 5 Group ran the Dambuster Raids of May 1943 from a house called St Vincents at the edge of town - Guy Gibson's Lancasters lifting from nearby airfields, flying the heavy modified bombs that smashed the Mohne and Eder dams. On D-Day in 1944, the same building housed the American Ninth Air Force's IX Troop Carrier Command, sending paratroopers towards Normandy.

St Wulfram's Church has the sixth highest spire of any church in England, a slim limestone needle visible for miles, lit at night since 1974. Inside, above the south porch, sits the oldest public library in England - around 230 chained books given in 1598 by a clergyman called Francis Trigge so that the literate laity and clergy of Grantham could read. The Angel and Royal in the High Street claims to be the oldest inn in England; King John reportedly held court there in 1213, and the gold angel over the archway commemorates a visit by Richard III. Sebastian Coe, the two-time Olympic 1500-metre gold medallist, grew up in Grantham. Edith Smith, sworn in here in 1915, became the first woman in Britain with full police powers of arrest. And outside the Beehive Inn, day in and day out, the bees go on with their work, paying no attention whatsoever to who lives in Number 10 Downing Street.