UPLANDS Drive was one of the first streets built on Harrowby’s council estate, going up in the 1930s not long after Harrowby itself was brought inside the Grantham borough boundary in 1929. The name comes from its position on the rising ground east of the town centre, looking down over the Witham valley below.
Before the estate arrived, this same high ground was known simply as Hall’s Hill, after Arthur Hall, MP for Grantham in the 1570s and 80s and the first person to translate Homer’s Iliad into English, who owned the fields here. It stood out at the time because there was so little else built on it.
The raid of 24 October 1942
ON the night of 24 October 1942, sirens sounded at 9.30pm as two German bombers were spotted over the town, dropping flares that turned the night as bright as day. Two high explosive bombs, believed to have been aimed at Bomber Command’s headquarters at St Vincent’s, missed their target: one fell on Bridge Street, the other scored a direct hit on an air raid shelter in Stuart Street, demolishing it along with a score of homes and killing 20 people, the bulk of that night’s casualties.
Firepot incendiary bombs damaged houses in Dudley Road and around Uplands Drive, and a further stick of bombs scored direct hits on four homes in Ermine Close, the turning off Uplands Drive. Across the town that night, 32 people were killed, 41 injured, half of them seriously, more than 500 left homeless, and over 600 properties damaged, 20 of them demolished and a further 80 needing extensive repairs.
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