Grantham By LeeAnn

Today we met at the Guild Hall in Grantham for a walking tour of the city. Grantham is the birthplace of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and is also the place where Isaac Newton went to school. Grantham’s population has grown drastically since 1801 when it was merely 3,300. This growth was because of world class agriculture equipment being introduced to the city. People came from nearby villages to where the money and lifestyle were better. Grantham, originally having one school for boys and a church, grew to have many of both. Today Grantham’s population is over 40,000.
There were lots of fascinating facts and places the tour guide shared with us, one of them being the Beehive Pub. It has a bee hive out front that acts as the pub’s sign with living bees inside. Next there was a relic of war painted on a brick wall which pointed to the emergency water supply. It changed color if the town was bombed, and Grantham was the most bombed town in England until the Blitz in 1940.
The most interesting place we visited was the parish church. The parish church has a lot of history in it including the Anglo Saxon pre-Norman part from about 950 A.D., the Norman part which goes up to about year 1219, and Grantham’s first marketplace. One of the things I found interesting in the church was one of the stained glass windows. It had four panes the two on the left pictured good people going to heaven, and the panes on the right side pictured bad people going to hell. The right two panes always stay dark no matter the time of year, because it was placed with a building blocking just those two panes from ever getting sunlight. The church also has a chain library called the Trigge library, which is the home to a book that has no other copy in the world. Its oldest book dates back to 1472 and it also has a book that belonged to Christopher Columbus.
After the tour we went shopping throughout the city and headed back to the manor for dinner and class time.
-LeeAnn