Margaret Thatcher

Residence 1

📍1 North Parade, Grantham, Lincolnshire NG31 8AN, England

“I was born Margaret Hilda Roberts on the 13th of October 1925 above my father Alfred's grocery shop in Grantham, Lincolnshire. The flat above the shop had no hot water and no garden, and my father's combination of commercial practicality and Methodist public service shaped my values entirely. He was an alderman and lay preacher and grocer, and from him I learned that hard work, self-reliance, and civic duty were not separate things. Grantham was a market town on the Great North Road, and the shop gave me a direct relationship with commerce — with the reality of profit and loss, of customers served and not served, of the difference between what you earned and what you spent. I have never stopped being the grocer's daughter from Grantham.”

Sources: Moore, C. Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (2013-2019), Allen Lane; Thatcher, M. The Path to Power (1995), HarperCollins

Residence 2

📍10 Downing Street, Westminster, London, United Kingdom

“I moved into Number Ten in May 1979 as the first woman to hold this office in British history, and I was determined that neither I nor anyone around me would treat that fact as the point. The point was the work. The building needed renovation — the previous occupants had let it become rather shabby — and I oversaw significant improvements to the state rooms, which I felt should reflect the dignity of the office. I worked from very early in the morning, often until past midnight, and I expected the same commitment from my team. Eleven and a half years is the longest anyone had served in Downing Street in over a century. The Falklands were decided here. The privatisations, the confrontation with the unions — all of it came through this building. I believed in what we were doing, and I still do.”

Sources: Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street years are documented in her memoirs The Downing Street Years (1993) and in Charles Moore's authorised biography (three volumes, 2013–2019).