This very entertaining portrait of Britain exactly 200 years ago is made especially enjoyable by the author's persistent penchant for picking out entertaining and unlikely detail.

He revels, for example, in describing the lifestyle of the egregious Prince Regent, a gross and absurd figure whose grotesquely indulgent lifestyle cost the stretched British state vast amounts of money it could hardly afford.

The actual monarch, King George III, was mad, deaf and blind, and effectively imprisoned in Windsor Castle. His son was a huge, debauched, drunken womaniser who was (and here we have a whiff of current controversies) constantly and quite reasonably mocked by the many excellent cartoonists of the day for his serial excesses. As Jane Austen wrote of Queen Caroline, "Poor woman. I shall support her for as long as I can because I hate her husband,..If I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she should have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved tolerably by her at first".

The prince was not bereft of good taste - he appreciated the literary work of his contemporaries Walter Scott and Austen - but he was the last person to give any kind of lead to a country that was struggling with the grievous social consequences of early industrialisation.These posed a far greater danger to the lives of ordinary folk than the erratic if nonetheless real military danger posed by Napoleon Bonaparte.

The much celebrated set- piece battle of Waterloo finally ended that threat, and Bates gives a good concise account of the military victory. But the battles that really needed to be won concerned social rather than foreign policy. Glorious victories abroad had little effect on the grim lives of the exploited workers of Britain - many of them young children.

The British were the first people to industrialise on a vast scale, but the necessary social and legislative response was sadly slow in arriving.

There were occasional prophetic figures such as David Dale and Robert Owen, whose example in Lanarkshire combined factory ownership with social concern; but they were exceptions. Far too few other employers followed their lead.

Parliament should of course have taken action, but it didn't start to do so properly for at least another two generations - and as Bates notes, 30 years on industrial Britain was still scarred by the systematic exploitation of child labour. It was not until the middle of the century that this finally began to change, and even then progress was disgracefully erratic.

So Bates is portraying an inventive, energetic society that had the seeds of greatness in it, but was not yet ready or willing to deal with the social consequences of rapid economic change. Systematic state-led intervention was desperately needed to improve the lives of the majority of ordinary people, yet it was not to be forthcoming till the administration of Sir Robert Peel - a Tory, and an unlikely and austere legislator for social amelioration - in the 1840s.

Bates writes in a most beguiling way. His method is to present a series of vivid snapshots, or sketches, which are enhanced by his eye for what is fascinating and quirky. If I have a criticism, it is only that his book is too London-centric.

The subtitle mentions Regency Britain but his book is to all intents about Regency England, and London in particular. To be fair, he gives great Scots such as John McAdam and Thomas Telford their due, but his perspective is English rather than British. He is good at personality: he presents crisp and engaging pen portraits of characters such as the unlikely veteran radical Major John Cartwright (whose more famous brother invented the power loom).

In this particular year, 1815, Cartwright was well into his seventies, but he was still an indefatigable and eloquent activist, tramping round Britain talking to all the ordinary folk he met and constantly agitating for parliamentary democracy and voting reform.

Cartwright observed that while some of his class travelled to admire lakes and mountains, he preferred to investigate the condition of the wretched, starving people. He was a heroic and committed radical: in 1814 he addressed a remarkable 35 public meetings during a one-month tour of Britain.

A thin and exceptionally fit man, he did not believe in revolution - his famous invocation was to "Hold fast to the law" - but despite that restraint, the agencies of the British state harassed and hounded him.

It is intriguing to reflect that if more attention had been paid to the likes of Cartwright, then two generations later it would not have been so necessary for Engels and Marx to ponder on the condition of the working class in England and to come up with a revolutionary new political idea that was to change the world.

Away back in 1954 the Cambridge historian Reginald White produced an excellent and much-loved book giving a vivid picture of English social and political life in the immediate aftermath of Waterloo. It is high but justified praise to note that Bates is White's worthy successor.

1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo, by Stephen Bates, is published by Head of Zeus, priced £25