In the 1967 TV programme The London Nobody Knows, James Mason ambles about London's grottier quarters. He goes to Victorian urinals in Holborn that used to have goldfish for users to gawk at; looks half-cut waving his umbrella at the Camden Roundhouse; visits an egg-breakers’ yard near the former site of the Clink prison. In one sequence at Church Street market, wide boys hawk their wares with rhymes about Jack and Jill on the pill while young Asian men rifle through discount record bins. St Paul's is obscured by scaffolding. John Davis’ London, like Mason's, is multipolar; it delights in alleyways, casinos, sex shops, office buildings, motorway overpasses and suburbs rather than the usual tourist spots. Those anticipating a ‘biography’ of post-war London will thus be somewhat disappointed by this effort; those seeking one of the richest, most varied accounts of a metropolis in recent years should be well pleased.

Topics of discussion are wide-ranging, from the gentrifier's discovery of Italian food to the Notting Hill riots. It is also decidedly unswinging. In the opening two chapters, ‘The death of swinging London’, the ‘largely mythical’ (p. 5) notion is killed off almost as soon as it is introduced. After a brief interlude in the newly fashionable trattorie, there are several chapters on London's changing physical landscape and the socio-political wranglings that went along with the Ringways, property speculation, early gentrification and beginnings of the conservation movement. For historians of the built environment, these are the standout chapters. The back third is a series of essays on racial politics, voluntary action and the Labour party – if these seem weaker, it is only in comparison to how good the first 10 (!) chapters are.

‘Becoming postindustrial’, the concluding chapter on London's experience of deindustrialization, ought to become a set text for any students of twentieth-century Britain due to its deft discussion of how the process served as a transition rather than a decline, and its argument that the drama of the process was how suddenly and utterly the rug was pulled out. As we know, London is still around and its economic influence has hardly waned. What happened in the 1970s in London was not a ‘decline’ – as many contemporary commentators argued and David Edgerton recently spent 500-odd pages discrediting – but a period of flux with many winners at the top and middle and a smaller section ‘at the sharp end of the inner-city malaise’ (p. 425) who lost out hard. But for most, as one bank manager noted in 1976, ‘nobody had to get rid of their tellies yet, or anything like that’ (p. 424). What also happened was that London's structural problems outgrew the bodies supposed to solve them, producing an often-justified – if retrospectively disastrous – popular and elite critique of ‘the state’ at large. Both are crucial to understanding not only British urban politics but serve as a useful template for analysing historical deindustrialization across the Global North.

Davis argues for the place of the sixties and seventies in British history, not as an era of affluent decadence annihilated overnight by Thatcherism, but as a foundation to the unsettlement of the eighties. The carving out of new, oppositional political identities by gentrifiers in the inner city and homeowners in the outer suburbs, the arch-individualism of London's cabbies, the widespread organizational and participatory failures of local government from demolitions to Docklands ‘Poplarism’: all these and more, it is argued, laid the groundwork for Thatcherism. As Davis makes explicit, Thatcher had very little to do initially with ‘Thatcher's Britain’: ‘She had not prompted the move towards owner occupation. She did not initiate the council-house sales, the calls for local taxation reform or the proposals to abolish the GLC’ (p. 433). Thus, the book finds itself in good company alongside the recent work of Ben Jackson, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite on deference and, within urban history, Guy Ortolano's Thatcher's Progress. If there is a criticism to be made of this argument, it is nitpicking about how well the period is served on its own terms by acting as a launching pad for Thatcherism – but reading the book puts this fear to rest quickly.

Like dogs and their owners, books sometimes resemble their subjects. The sixteen self-contained essays – some of which have been previously published, like the fantastic chapter on cab drivers as proto-Thatcherites – that make up Waterloo Sunrise mimic London itself, their appeal lying in the accumulation and layering of detail. Patrick Abercrombie described London as a ‘city of villages’, and it is hard not to regard Davis’ book positively in similar terms. Each chapter works perfectly well by itself, but together they form an impressive whole. Its thirty-year gestation is evident; detail from a startling breadth of sources is heaped onto every page (it really does feel at points that Davis read everything published in local and trade presses across two decades). Despite this, it is not bloated by comprehensiveness or digression; essays are kept lean and muscular. Consequently, many things are conspicuously missing like students and their universities, while Horace Cutler is rendered almost peripheral. This is a defiantly quotidian book in which Pizza Express was more important to the average Londoner than were the Provisional IRA.

One wonders if the book's argument would be better served by a full chapter (it is addressed partially alongside homeownership) on strains of urban Toryism – genuinely novel antecedents of Thatcherism – rather than an admittedly topical account of generational conflicts within Labour. Likewise, there are some essays one wishes were included, most significantly Davis’ 2001 article on Rachmanism, condensed into four pages at the start of chapter 5. But as I say, these are nitpicks; and it is a compliment that the only complaints are about what the book does not do. In what it does do, Waterloo Sunrise is a remarkable work whose insights are many, frequently unexpected and always rigorously researched.