One day in 2013, Jo Plimmer visited a care home in Bristol as part of a local art project. There she met a former milkman called Garth England. “He pointed to three A4 folders on his bookshelf,” she recalls. “I got them down, opened them – and there were these beautiful drawings of local streets.” Plimmer, who has a background in history and archaeology, describes it as a “hairs on the back of your neck encounter”. England was a secret artist – so secret, he didn’t know he was one.

His extraordinary drawings, made in Hengrove Lodge care home between 2006 and 2013 and published in a beautiful book called Murdered with Straight Lines, capture the changing city through the eyes of this post-war everyman. Born in Bristol general hospital in 1935, England spent most of his 79 years in the city’s suburban south: in Knowle West, Hengrove, Bedminster and Totterdown (described by writer Jonathan Meades as “the best-named place in Britain, where late Victorian houses do indeed teeter madly on impossible slopes”).

England’s working life fused him with his locale. A paperboy, a telegram boy, a milkman and, finally, a railwayman, he absorbed the fabric of his various communities by going out walking and chatting. “The outer edges of cities are quite hard to access on an art project,” says Plimmer. “It’s hard to find the heart of the place.” England’s work provided a handy way in. “Everybody who sees these drawings remembers Garth,” says Plimmer. “He delivered their milk.”

Man with a plan ... the ground floor of Hengrove Lodge. Photograph: Mike Leigh, Knowle and Totterdown Local History Society

One of England's drawings shows him as a paperboy delivering to a row of prefabs, his brother going to collect tadpoles

Grand inner-city architecture can often tell its own story. Functional housing further out requires people – residents – to tell its tale. One of England’s drawings depicts a row of prefabs in Knowle, showing paperboy England collecting the money for the newspapers, his brother going to collect tadpoles in jam jars, and the pools man with his bicycle leaning against the kerb.

In another, grown-up Garth looks out from behind a tiny pencil-drawn curtain in the window of a bombed-out house where he used to play. Many sketches tell stories of the buildings’ inner lives. Houses that England never entered get speculative floor plans, and there are detailed depictions of his parents’ clean-lined modern furniture, juxtaposed with his grandmother’s heavier-set oak pieces.

“There is something very truthful to Bristol’s suburban development in the details, almost like a social history,” says architectural historian Andrew Foyle, who lives in south Bristol. “What struck me was how extraordinarily accurate to specific houses a lot of Garth’s work is. If you put the Grange at 258 Wells Road, Knowle into Google Maps, for example, you can see he’s completely there.”

Furnished with pride ... 15 Springleaze and 86 Redcatch Rd. Photograph: Mike Leigh, Knowle and Totterdown Local History Society

Another surprise is that England dated each building, even though many were built before he was born. “I checked whether the local history society had helped,” says Foyle, “but the work was already done well before they got involved.”

From childhood onwards, England used a ruler to draw and the book’s title comes from something his teacher said, holding up his work in front of the class as an example of what not to do: “He’s murdered it with straight lines.” In later life, his memory remained as acute as his technique was naive. Yet if his straight lines are a quirk, they are a functional one, lending themselves to the modernity that characterised the postwar years.

England's generation followed the traces of their memories, not Google

His work could be a Jeremy Deller readymade, a dispatch from a time before irony overload. It shows a more functional civic life than today, with abundant social housing and a new welfare state. But that’s not to say it is nostalgic. All is not perfect; there are niggles and regrets. As an evacuee, England was treated badly when he first arrived at his temporary residence in Glastonbury. And in the years preceding retirement, one of his colleagues died while cycling to work for his night shift.

England never married and had no children so didn’t receive many visitors at the care home. He spoke to one of his brothers, who would drop by from time to time, but the staff in the home, where he lived because of a heart condition, were fond of him. “His life had been so much about being out and delivering, his social life had been linked to his work life,” says Plimmer. “But he didn’t seem melancholy. He seemed very content with his life.”

Not such blurred lines ... Redcliffe Bay, Portishead in 1947. Photograph: Mike Leigh, Knowle and Totterdown Local History Society

Beautifully designed by Polimekanos, the book gives England’s coloured sketches and cartoon-strip depictions the space to breathe. The sharpness of his visual recollections reminds you that his generation followed the traces of their memories, not Google. Suburban streets have since been usurped by Facebook as the site of casual communication.

“There were rows of local shops where everybody in Hengrove did their shopping,” says Foyle. “Most of that has gone as people drive to Tesco now. Something is needed to replace that sense of a local centre. Can it be refashioned? That’s a really hard one to answer, but having this as a record is brilliant.”

England died in 2014, so never got to see the book or the curtain Future Perfect created for Hengrove community centre, featuring some of his drawings. But his work has been recognised by Bristol’s art world: the Arnolfini gallery is stocking the book and Garth’s drawings have been installed in the Bristol archive, where they will continue to weave memories into civic history.