After Brexit, Londoners were heard muttering about having “more in common with Paris than Preston”; some 70,000 people signed an online petition calling for the capital to secede from the UK. If that unlikely event should ever happen, the new city state could perhaps look to Curiocity for its little red book. Or, more accurately, its whopping great red book, since Henry Eliot and Matt Lloyd-Rose’s cloth-bound, illustrated treasury of London-related data, tips, impressions, recommendations, instructions, injunctions, reminiscences, myths, lists, plans, flow charts and much else besides runs to more than 450 tactile paper pages. At this juncture, almost everything about it feels purposely, almost comically, designed to rub regional Brexiters up the wrong way.

For a start, its co-authors are youngish and have nothing but love for the capital. One of them, Lloyd-Rose, having decamped to Argentina in 2015 after seven years in London and a shared flat in Crouch End, filed his contributions from Buenos Aires – a detail trumpeted with a degree of global go-getting pride in the accompanying biographical notes. It also may explain the passing reference to a Jorge Luis Borges story in the introduction, and the hint in a section on dating that the Negracha Tango House in Holborn is the ideal place to take a date to if you want to reach third base.

Curiocity began life in 2009 as an easily pocketable, fold-out map-magazine that ran to six editions. This new, scarcely backpack-able volume, arranged in an A-Z format, also has cartography at its heart. Playful hand‑drawn pictorial maps by cartoonist Stephen Appleby and others – on such themes as London Utopia or featuring the Empire Windrush bobbing on the Thames – crop up with the regularity of Dot Cotton in EastEnders. Phyllis Pearsall, the progenitor of the London street atlas, is cited as inspiration, alongside the lexicographer and coiner of that most tiresome observation about tiredness of the capital, Dr Samuel Johnson.

The ghost of quite another London Johnson – Boris – hangs over its Tiggerish authors’ occasionally florid outbreaks of boosterism. (They do, however, rightly credit his mayoral predecessor Ken Livingstone for the “Boris Bike” cycling scheme.) Ultimately, this book is much more a product of Silicon Roundabout than Grub Street. While there are brief pieces from a former lord mayor, the astronomer royal and the writers Philip Pullman, Monica Ali and Nick Papadimitriou, a lengthy list of Twitter handles at the back credits unspecified contributions from the hive mind of social media.

Indeed the layout of the book, with its plethora of infographics, countless footnotes and cross-references to other sections, invites – quite possibly induces – internet-stye browsing of its pages. The pleasurably apocryphal can sometimes get crushed by qualifiers, and the fascinating lost amid dull exposition. A degree of press release cut-and-paste is also in evidence. Yet the authors’ delight in London trivia is infectious. I had never given much thought to the origins of the fast‑food chain Chicken Cottage, but it was a pleasure to find its story outlined here. Such a titbit might become as invaluable to future students of obesity in the early 21st century as Henry Mayhew’s accounts of street piemen are to our understanding of Victorian eating habits.

If there’s anyone who still yearns for London to leave the UK, Eliot and Lloyd-Rose show that the idea is not without its historical precedent. In 1977, the squatter residents of Freston Road in Notting Hill attempted to establish the breakaway Independent Republic of Frestonia; its citizens all adopted the surname Bramley in a bid to confuse local council officials intent on evicting them. Another example: since 2008, the father and son-founded, budding dominion of Austenasia, composed of a handful of terrace houses not far from Croydon Ikea, has been making its own bid for freedom, if so far only obtaining recognition from a no less eccentric micronation in Manitoba.

As for linking with Europe, it emerges that during the second world war, a suite in Claridge’s hotel, Mayfair, was fleetingly ceded to Yugoslavia to allow the Crown Prince Alexander, child of the exiled king, to be born on “home” soil – suggesting that when officials put their minds to it, London’s geography can be almost limitless.