Much of Britain remains so morbidly fixated with its past and its landscape that the two often appear inseparable. On TV, property makeovers, historical re-enactments, garden rearrangements blur into one so that, were it not for the sportswear, cars and BlackBerries, you could be in a parallel universe where the Edwardians invented cable television, and the labour movement, the welfare state, modernity and modernism were just a bad dream.

Time Team is one of those programmes. The archaeologist Francis Pryor is a long-standing member of the team, and has been applying its insights to a series of books on Britain's history of which The Birth of Modern Britain is the last. It takes a vaguely chronological approach, going from the fields and farms of the 18th century to the grand civil engineering projects of what he refuses to call the industrial revolution, and the apparatuses of social care and social (and military) oppression that kept it going.

Pryor spends a lot of time justifying the notion of modern archaeology, one that doesn't simply involve the excavation of the ancient. If this makes the book sound coherent, don't be fooled  it freewheels through artefact and anecdote. Pryor's magpie approach can bring up some remarkable pieces of information, but a ruthless editor would have cut half the book. At one point a discussion of the village of Little Gidding is interrupted with "10 years ago, along with hundreds of others, I went to Buckingham Palace to receive an MBE, not for archaeology but for 'services to tourism'." If you find this charming, then you'll love this book. If not, probably not.

If you can get through the style, there's much to admire. Pryor takes aim at the notion of the heroic industrial inventor, rightly pointing out that long-term processes, complex interactions of capital and technology and the appropriation of already extant inventions played more of a role than straightforward invention. However, he downplays the shocking, alarming and  yes  revolutionary impression that industrial development had on people in a process of terrifying, exhilarating change. No hint of this sublime terror ever enters Pryor's account. He drops the notion of an industrial revolution because it implies compressing three centuries of change into one leap  fair enough, but is the emasculated "birth" of modernity here really any better?

The virtue of the small-scale approach is that it throws up fascinating details. An excursion to Ribblehead Viaduct, an industrial folly whose construction led to the deaths of hundreds, leads to the excavation of a "navvy hut", complete with unpleasantly fresh cesspool; and a collection of "spar boxes", folk art by north Pennine miners arranged around precious stones found in the pits. Pryor is too smart to let nostalgia cloud his account. Sometimes the riffs can be wearyingly familiar  the canard that post-war planners did as much damage as the Luftwaffe is repeated early on  but then we have ventures into the functionalist anti-aesthetics of the contemporary farm, with its tin shacks and factory lines, on pillboxes, cold war bunkers and M1 bridges. At it's best, this book smuggles some aberrant and strange things into heritage England. Perhaps that's enough.

Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain is published by Verso.