Margaret Thatcher: The Lady had the great city of London in her heart

The former Prime Minister left her imprint on so many parts of the capital, as Nick Curtis explains
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17 April 2013

She was from Lincolnshire, Grantham to be specific, and was given a peerage as Baroness Kesteven in that county. Her legacy was defined by her policies in the industrial North, the Falklands conflict, the international financial markets, Central Europe and Washington. But the place with which Margaret Thatcher became most strongly associated was London. She imprinted herself on the capital not just as the first female Tory leader and prime minister but as an emblem of its mercurial, fast-changing nature.

From the start she was, fittingly enough, not just associated with the centre of London — with Westminster and the City, Chelsea and St James’s, where old power, both political and social, reside — but also with its wider reaches. Dartford, where she was first selected as a Tory candidate in 1949, Erith, where she first met her husband Denis, Finchley, Dulwich … all have their place in the mosaic of her personality and her political beliefs. It’s hard for those of us over 40 to think of Brixton without thinking of her. Likewise, the financial heart of London, following her enthusiastic redevelopment of Docklands and the deregulation of the Square Mile in 1986.

Look at the images on these pages, taken for the Rex Features photographic agency, and it is surprising how many spark a potent jolt of memory. They also show how much London changed in her time, or was changed by her. Here is Mrs Thatcher, opening the M25 — goodness, was that really as recently as 1986? Here also she is striding, troubled but determined from King’s Cross station after the fire that claimed 31 lives in 1987. And in 1988, standing alone in front of the derelict Battersea Power Station, as it underwent its first alterations for John Broome’s planned theme park — a sort of reverse-Docklands, where the transition from old industry to leisure and the service sector is yet to work.

For a woman so supposedly austere and unapproachable, she had a shrewd way with photo opportunities, and was aware of how useful London could be as a backdrop. Just look at her feeding the ducks in Hyde Park, joking with a policeman outside Downing Street, laughing alongside Richard Branson as their interests and go-ahead attitudes coalesced. Remember the photographs of her redecorating her daughter Carol’s flat? It wasn’t just stage-managed media events either. She was as often seen out in public, arguing her case, as she was in the Commons. Images of London in the pre-Thatcher days of Heath and Wilson showed us the effect of political impotence: rubbish piled high in Leicester Square, strikers on the streets, and never a politician to be seen. She changed that, becoming a visible leader in London.

Today her funeral took place in the very heart of the capital, and her ashes will be interred next to her husband’s, near the entrance to the Margaret Thatcher care wing in the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. But to paraphrase Christopher Wren’s epitaph, if you seek her monument, do not look there: look around you. From Canary Wharf to Westminster, Dulwich to Finchley, it is here.

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