Diaries of greed, lust and love Love Locked holds the stories of people facing a new technology, of people wrecked or profiting from a financial catastrophe, of two people impassioned by illicit love. These stories are unlocked through their diaries, letters and memoirs. In 1720 newsman Wakeman Frith captures the panic and violence of a town that is in fear of the innovative Kennet Navigation. He journals the voyage of a bargemaster and his daughter Lynn along the hated waterway that will take jobs and livelihoods away from Reading to Newbury. He writes about an unlikely hero emerging from the clamour of people greedily investing in the South Sea Company. Frith is exchanging letters with his new, consuming love Catherine. She is a free-spirited artist but is a married mother. Sir George Crockmore is spinning his memoirs promoting his rapacious schemes for gaining wealth and carnal pleasure. The mayor’s wilful daughter Olivia has her own battles, writing in her secret diary of her vexations with her parents and her siblings, frustrations with her betrothed and her outrageous ambition. These documents and others have been collected and edited together in Love Locked. It is an insight into social and personal turbulence through the eyes of those embroiled.