William Hallam grew up in the little village of Lockinge (Berkshire) but lived for the rest of his life in Swindon, where he was employed at the Great Western Railway Works. His remarkable diaries (eighty-two volumes: 1886–1952) provide an exceptional opportunity to assess the effects of moving from a rural, agricultural background to an urban, industrial one. Hallam was in many respects a classic example of the alienated industrial worker. This certainly intensified his passionate ruralism, yet its roots lay much further back, in the deep-seated loyalties formed by his early experiences in Lockinge. Indeed, although he was a working-class man rather than a genteel middle-class woman, the parallels between the role landscape played in Hallam’s life and in Beatrix Cresswell’s are remarkably close.