The problem was not that the kids were unreachable, he stresses, but that he had blundered into the straitjacket of the “Gove curriculum”, in which the then education minister Michael Gove had imposed strict limits on what could be taught.

In Poor , Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. Not exceptional brilliance, he insists – “there was nothing special about me” – but having teachers who inspired him early on with a love of poetry.

In an interview with Vulture, Michaela Coel considered the impact of a childhood lived beside the brutalist architecture of inner city towerblocks: ‘I think there is something in growing up in concrete and not understanding putting fingers in soil, growing things, foundation. While the BBC/HBO comedy-drama is certainly not suitable for a teenage audience, Caleb Femi’s Poor certainly is. Nobody today can remember exactly what it looked like except that it radiated bright colours across the concrete, and became a gathering point for the community. In A Designer Talks of Home / A Resident Talks of Home, Femi overlays one viewpoint of Peckham over another, demonstrating the literal and figurative ways in which the poor have been silenced and buried, bulldozed to make space for market forces.

As artists, both Coel and Femi have both done something revolutionary, political and vital with their art form, foregrounding the lived inner-city experiences of black people in the UK today. Caleb Femi will be in conversation with Brenda Emmanus for a live-streamed event with Penguin Live and Theatre Peckham on 5 November. One of the most culturally arresting moments of this quite extraordinary year was the arrival on our screens of the BBC/HBO comedy-drama I May Destroy You.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Both areas have been subject to gentrification; once abhorrent working-class no man’s land, now fashionable places to open a wine bar or restaurant for the middle-class people who have the capital to invest. Harling offers her own reaction to the poet, filmmaker, photographer and former young people’s laureate for London.

A few decades ago, this would have seemed unimaginable; and Femi unreservedly reminds the reader of the brutality of poverty that has shaped the endz. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Giving a mythic resonance to communal life , the poems in Caleb Femi's Poor are vital, confronting and electric . We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.Indeed, Coel (whose review of Poor graces the front cover of the 2020 Penguin edition) seems to have responded in the same way to reading Femi’s book: ‘Oh my God, he’s just stirring me.