Brett Anderson, the singer in Suede, remembers walking past the railway station in Haywards Heath, the satellite town in south-east England where he grew up. "You knew that each train was going up to London," he said, "And you'd think, 'I wish I was on that'."

The capital has long held a magnetic attraction to the young, the talented and the dispossessed, and particularly so for those harbouring musical ambitions. Even the Beatles regarded getting to London as a crucial aiming point, and while they famously took pride in their Liverpudlian heritage - inventing Merseybeat along the way - the capital was where all their important music was actually made and conveyed to the world.

It has been fashionable in recent times to celebrate regional diversity, and in media circles one is now required to hold firmly in check the urge to peddle a so-called London-centric view of the world. How refreshing, then, to find a thoroughly researched book that not only recognises but unabashedly lionises "the most exciting and innovative musical city on earth". A book written, what's more, by a northerner!

Paul Du Noyer's previous book, Liverpool - Wondrous Place, explored the rich musical heritage of the author's hometown, and was published several years before that city was, rather propitiously for him, named the European capital of culture. However, his new book, In The City: A Celebration Of London Music, digs considerably deeper in the historical mud to expose the musical roots of a cultural capital that really has no need of official endorsements.

It begins with the 16th-century peasant forebear of Brett Anderson arriving in London armed with a collection of village folk songs, to be greeted by a clamour the like of which he would never have heard before. Cannons, drums and the ringing of bells provided a background accompaniment to the songs of street traders, organ grinders and "topical balladeers".

Tracing the musical development of the city from such an early starting point is an ambitious task, but Du Noyer manages to chart a route from the ballad singers and music hall entertainers of the 19th century through to the wartime rallying cries of Vera Lynn with a brisk, authoritative touch. It certainly makes a pleasant and informative change to come across a music journalist who does not assume that the history of popular song began with "Rock Around the Clock". But while he skillfully joins up the dots from Gilbert & Sullivan to Noel Coward, it is nevertheless not until the postwar advent of skiffle and the first faint stirrings of English rock'n'roll that Du Noyer's story of London music really takes off.

It seems hard to believe that when a cockney merchant seaman called Thomas Hicks returned to London from a visit to New York with a guitar that he had bought there, the instrument was so unusual that he had difficulty finding anywhere to buy new strings. By the time Hicks had changed his name to Tommy Steele and recorded a song called Rock With the Caveman, written by Lionel Bart, the idea of young men accompanying themselves with guitars in London coffee bars and elsewhere was already a lot more familiar. And when a fledgling group of R&B enthusiasts called the Rolling Stones were spotted playing at the Station Hotel in Richmond by a 19-year-old would-be manager called Andrew Loog Oldham, the die of 20th-century pop was well and truly cast.

The Stones became and remain the biggest musical act to come from London. But despite references to Stepney, Knightsbridge and St John's Wood in early numbers such as "Play With Fire", they were a group who imported their key musical influences from America and, Du Noyer argues, ended up in a spiritual sense as more of a New York band than a London one. Far more immersed in the traditions of London were the Kinks, whose song "Waterloo Sunset" remains the unassailable "all-time london favourite" song, according to the book's wide-ranging list of recommended listening. "I enjoyed working with the culture rather than fighting it and pretending, like some of my contemporaries, that they were in America or they grew up in Memphis," said the group's singer and songwriter, Ray Davies.

The search for a cultural identity, and where it leads the participants, is a recurring theme throughout the book. Du Noyer spends little time on acts such as Queen and Pink Floyd, who "came together in London but were ultimately from nowhere and . . . ended up everywhere". He focuses instead on performers who are part of a deeper cultural continuum, including David Bowie, Ian Dury, the Clash, the Sex Pistols (whom he describes as London's "last great music hall act") and Madness.

"When you watch Suggs, of Madness, moving on a stage, you seem to see the instinctive personal ballet of a Londoner, clocking the ever-changing scene, weighing the dangers, looking for an opening," he writes. The new "personal ballet" of a Londoner, as evolved by more recent stars such as Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty, would seem to involve a more Dickensian set of movements, or as the author puts it "an embodiment of the drive and inspiration that the city can give to a newcomer, but also the snares and temptations that await the unwary". A dense and colourful account of one of the most vibrant musical centres in the world, In the City almost puts you on that train to London.

 David Sinclair's Wannabe: The Spice Girls Revisited is published by Omnibus.