THE bookshop at the centre of Sylvia Riley’s book was demolished in the early 1970s, along with most other buildings in the gridiron streets of St Ann’s in Nottingham.

Some locals claim a spirit of camaraderie left the area along with the rats, cockroaches and Victorian terraces.

Less frequently lamented is the rich seam of radical activity that emerged at the start of the 1960s and vanished before the break-up of the Beatles.

These cultural erasures are major themes in Winter at the Bookshop, a hard-boiled elegy for a time, place and community.

Admirers of Riley’s novels, written under the pen name Carol Lake, will appreciate the clarity, deft characterisation and telling detail of her non-fiction.

They will also recognise her signature device of building a comprehensive picture of a community through overlapping narrative fragments that jump back and forth in time.

The author’s exposition of her youthful thoughts and actions is the literary equivalent of Stanley Spencer’s self-portraits — there’s an intense, unflinching honesty in her depiction of certain incidents.

When a briefcase containing provocative and confidential documents is left in her care, it is hurled onto waste ground in a fit of drunken resentment.

It’s a shocking but amusing betrayal of trust which, oddly, lends additional weight to the segments demonstrating the author’s political commitment.

The book’s other key character is the bookshop’s proprietor, the cantankerous but dedicated Trotskyist Pat Jordan.

A man you’d rather have as a comrade than a next-door-neighbour, Jordan was a one-person community hub, unofficial childminder, bookseller, printer of political documents and, in contemporary jargon, a “networker.”

With fellow activists Peter Price and Ken Coates, he founded the International Group. In later years Coates became an MEP, a founder of the Workers’ Control movement and, eventually, the victim of New Labour’s anti-left witch hunt.

Jordan’s energy and organisational skills and his ability to generate funding were pivotal in the success of the International Group and, consequently, in Nottingham’s short-term acquisition of the nickname “Trottingham.”

Riley’s writing is most incisive when she describes the failed heroism of Jordan and comrades and the destructive infighting that led to a devastating split.

The book’s most poignant passages highlight the harsh, and sometimes tragic, lives of the children of St Ann’s but this is leavened with wry observations about specific activists, politicians, neighbourhood feuds and shifting relationships.

Then there’s Riley’s celebration of her chaotic youth, breakfasting on butterscotch ice cream and dodging the tedium of a regular job.

There are frustrating loose ends. We never, for example, discover the nature of Pat’s “spectacular” fall from grace.

But this is a funny, incisive and touching book that highlights the awkward collision of idealism and the everyday.

Winter at the Bookshop: Politics and Poverty, St Ann’s in the 1960s, is published by Five Leaves, £7.99.