‘I got stop and searched the week my hit novel came out’

Hot young writer Caleb Azumah Nelson tells Emma Loffhagen about how gentrification is changing Peckham, and why an incident with the Met shows the police still have a race problem

THERE is a scene halfway through Caleb Azumah Nelson's latest novel, Small Worlds, where the protagonist Stephen - a teenage second-generation migrant of Ghanaian parents - visits his family friend Auntie Yaa's local Afro-Caribbean food shop. As he rounds the corner of Peckham High Street, he finds the shutters down, a padlock affixed to the door. "Rent raised," Stephen's older brother Ray later explains to him. "Doubled. Tripled. Auntie's shop is done."

When I meet Nelson on a bright morning in a cafe on Peckham's vibrant Rye Lane, I can't help but think that it is exactly the kind of place that might have replaced Auntie Yaa's. Esoteric variations of coffee beans and organic milks line the walls, light bouncing off the minimalist white and ecru interiors. We are surrounded by a frankly startling amount of Fisherman beanies.

"I think it was like 15 years ago when I first noticed not only the landscape changing but the community," 30-yearold Nelson tells me, sipping a batch brew. "I could see the Afro-Caribbean shops the hair shops, nail shops, barbers which were a mainstay of my childhood, one by one beginning to disappear. At the time, there was a real level of, not just frustration, but actual anger. It was like, where's the community going? Who's looking out for us?" The nucleus of the black community in London, Peckham has more recently become synonymous with a cautionary tale of rampant gentrification, its local community increasingly pushed further and further out by spiralling house prices and big money now sniffing around SE15. When I gesture to the space around us - a slight elephant in the room - Nelson smiles knowingly.