When Francis Sheppard, who has died aged 96, applied to be the first general editor of the Survey of London, his interviewers at the London county council asked him if he could pledge to publish a new volume in the series once a year. Rashly he said yes.

That was mission impossible, he soon discovered. And only weeks into the job, his wife, Pamela, died in childbirth, leaving him with two small children. Yet between 1954 and his retirement in 1983 Sheppard produced no fewer than 16 volumes of the Survey of London.

In the process he transformed what had been a sporadic and selective record of London’s historic buildings, area by area, into a model of urban topographical writing, rich in content, authoritative, gracefully composed, beautifully illustrated, and still an unequalled resource for anyone interested in London’s history and architecture. No city in the world can boast an equivalent to the Survey of London series, which is now well past its 50th volume. It owes its modern form and reputation to Sheppard, who may be fairly claimed to be London’s greatest topographical writer since John Stow, the Elizabethan historian.

That Sheppard’s name is not better known is due to his modesty. Disliking fuss, he was content to be a tiny cog in the municipal machine that was the London county council, later the Greater London council, so long as he was allowed to get on with the job, aided by a small team of loyal subordinates. Yet he was not without ambition or drive.

From 1949 to 1953 Francis Sheppard was an assistant keeper at the London Museum

Some mornings he would bound up the stairs of County Hall, not waiting for the lift, bolt like a rabbit into his office and nestle between a fan of papers, hardly emerging before the next draft chapter had been completed for the typist in his beetling longhand. On others he might be found head deep in some record office or private archive, making the pinpoint-accurate notes from which his texts were composed.

As a historian, Sheppard took time to emerge. He was born in Cobham, Surrey, the son of Leslie Sheppard, known as LA Sheppard, an expert on early printed books at the British Museum; his mother, Dorothy (nee Ewbank), had been a nurse and translator in a Red Cross unit during the first world war.

Francis attended Bradfield college, near Reading, then studied history at King’s College, Cambridge. After a false start or two, his first satisfactory job was in the West Sussex county record office in Chichester, where he acquired a taste for archives and for the makeup of English townscape, which was as yet little explored.

From 1949 to 1953 he was an assistant keeper at the London Museum, now the Museum of London, which moved into Kensington Palace during Sheppard’s time there. Much later he wrote a history of the museum, The Treasury of London’s Past (1991). Its director, the archaeologist WF Grimes, suggested that Sheppard should write a doctorate if he wanted to get on: he chose to study the voluminous parish records of Marylebone.

The result was a masterpiece with the consummately uncharismatic title Local Government in St Marylebone 1688–1835. Inspired by the Edwardian scholarship of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and published in 1958, it is a most readable and lucid study of English local government.

In the 1950s interest in urban architecture and planning stopped short at the Victorian period. Sheppard was aware of the need to go further, and began to do so in his first volume of the reanimated Survey, on south Lambeth (1956).

But the LCC’s historic buildings division, with which he and his colleagues were linked in a sometimes uneasy relationship, was more concerned with the threat to Georgian buildings in the West End, which the researches of the Survey could help to defend. So the series concentrated its investigations during the 60s and 70s on St James’s, Soho, Covent Garden and Mayfair. The impact of these volumes on conserving swathes of inner London was most notable in the case of Covent Garden, where the Survey’s discoveries helped derail the GLC’s own destructive plans for the area.

Later Sheppard turned his attention to Kensington, the area where he had been brought up. Under the influence of his friend HJ Dyos, a pioneer of modern British urban history, the Survey started to treat areas of London in a holistic way, drawing urban development, architecture and social and economic history together. Northern Kensington, published in 1973, was the first volume to feature this fuller approach, even becoming something of a bestseller.

Despite the demands of the Survey, Sheppard found time to publish in 1971 a first-rate history of the Victorian metropolis, London 1808–1870: The Infernal Wen, and after his retirement the broader London: A History (1998).

During all this time he lived not in London but in Henley-on-Thames, where he was very active in civic life for a period. Enraged by attempts to demolish the august Catherine Wheel, an old coaching inn in the town’s main street, he led a successful campaign of resistance. Out of that came the foundation of the Henley Society, of which he was the first secretary. He served for 10 years as a councillor, and for a year as mayor of Henley. He wrote a history of the local brewery, Brakspear’s (1979).

Sheppard is survived by Rupert and Joanna, the children from his first marriage, to Pamela Davies, and by Arabella, the daughter of his marriage to Elizabeth Lees, whom he married in 1957 and who died in 2014.

• Francis Henry Wollaston Sheppard, historian, born 10 September 1921; died 22 January 2018