Sixty years ago, as Britain was recovering from the Second World War, the Leander Club in Henley-on-Thames played host to a very important event - the rowing races of the 1948 London Olympics. Last month, it hosted another momentous occasion - the launch of Janie Hampton's The Austerity Olympics, a book about those long-ago games.

It is a quirky, captivating book, crammed full of facts and it does not take long to realise that a phenomenal amount of research has gone into it. Yet this is no dry tome, it is also a lively piece of social history that not only details the training regimes and gives interesting anecdotes about the Olympians and the organisers, but encompasses the views of ordinary people who attended the games or were inspired by them. It gives a fascinating snapshot of a country still recovering from the Second World War. "It was a time of food-rationing and clothes rationing and petrol rationing, and nobody had very much to eat or to live on, and you went by bus," Janie explained.

In the introduction, she writes that it was not like any other Olympic Games before or since, so when we met up I asked her why.

"Because it was the first international celebration after the war and there was very little money," she said. "It didn't occur to athletes that they had to be put up in a five-star hotel. They were quite happy to be put up in school classrooms, tents - whatever was available. They had to take their ration books with them and they were just used to it."

The Brits were determined it would be nothing like the Nazis' Berlin Olympics of 1936. "It was going back to the Olympic ideals of amateurism and sport for sport's sake," she said. That changed when Helsinki hosted the Olympics in 1952. The Russians had sent people to watch the 1948 Olympics, but had not competed themselves since the Russian Revolution. "They said that sport is about the individual. Then they saw this as an opportunity to view sport as a thing of national pride," Janie said "So, in '52 at Helsinki, the Soviet Union sent a huge team and that's when the whole Cold War - communist versus capitalist - kicked off."

The book took about two-and-a-half years to write. Janie got the idea in Trafalgar Square on July 6, 2005, when it was announced that London had won the 2012 bid. An old lady in the crowd talked about having seen the swimming at the 1948 Olympics and how different the next one would be. "I went and looked up old newspapers to see what was going on and then I thought, 'There's a really exciting story here, because they did it on a shoestring'," she said. "I spent a month writing a proposal and interviewing a few people and then my agent sent it out and about a dozen publishers really wanted it." She had assumed that lots of other people would have had the same idea, but they hadn't. The book came out in time for the 60th anniversary.

Janie is the biographer of comedian Joyce Grenfell, who for many people epitomises the post-war period. Joyce's god-daughter, Janie lives in Temple Cowley in a house full of colour and clucking, courtesy of the chicks in the kitchen. Her suburban garden is a dream for any "good life" enthusiast, with a vegetable patch, fruit patch, a pond and ducks, quails, chickens and bantams in various houses.

She lived for some time in Zimbabwe and came to Oxford in 1985, liking it so much that she and her husband Charles decided to stay. "I like the fact that it's small enough that you can cycle everywhere and bump into people and big enough that you go on meeting new people," she said.

The 1948 Olympics was important for lots of reasons, but what makes Janie's book special is the social history that she weaves into it. Take the story of Joseph Birrell, for example, a young hurdler from Barrow-in-Furness whose story is fascinating for several reasons. He didn't train that much and had to make his own hurdles. In the book he describes how the competitors took drugs. "We ate Horlicks tablets by the handful! With no sweets available, they were a real treat." His parents had to wait at home for a reporter to telephone a neighbour who then came up to say their son was in the Olympic team. They were unable to see his race, as there was no television signal in Lancashire. Contrast Joseph's story with that of the athletes who will be competing at the 2012 games, and you realise how much things have changed.

The Austerity Olympics is published by Aurum at £18.99.