I knew Peckham long before it was gentrified – I stumbled into one its most hipster venues this week and felt so out of place

There I was, a great big middle-aged Alice among groups of young people artfully looking distressed and ordering ‘Umeboshi pumpkin salsa’, which I’d never even heard of

Frank’s is a bar on top of the multistorey car park in Peckham

I don’t get cheques any more – they’re sweet, aren’t they? Obviously not as sweet as a great big bundle of filthy cash tucked into your bra after a gig in a pub back in the Nineties. Ah, those were the days of the box office split, when you could stand onstage and watch through thick fag fog the bloke on the door counting up the night’s ticket takings (usually stashed in a pint glass) and dividing it into little piles depending on the number of comics on the bill.

Stand-up is the only thing that has ever improved my maths. In the early days, I got really good at estimating the number of heads in an audience, multiplying it by the cost of the ticket and then making a rough estimate of how much I was going to earn. Some nights it was just loose change that I’d be pouring into my bra, and no kebab for me on the way home.

Anyway, my mother gave me a cheque for Christmas and it’s taken me more than a month to find the time to pay it into the bank. This is because banks have become “as rare as hen’s teeth” (to quote my mum): the two nearest HSBCs to me – one in East Dulwich, the other in Camberwell – have closed; the former is a rather smart vets’ surgery and the latter is empty, boarded up so thoroughly that street sleepers can’t use its precious doorway (honestly, how vile can you get?)

However, there is one roughly a mile away in Peckham, so, suffering from writer’s block and having already made more disgusting soup than my waste disposal unit was going to cope with, I trotted off: I had the afternoon to kill.

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Peckham. It has some of the loveliest properties in south London: in the middle of Peckham lies an exquisite Georgian village, all box hedges and Farrow and Ball-ed front doors, and then round the corner is Rye Lane.

Rye Lane is quite gritty and it smells; nail bars fight with Blue Planet-style fishmongers; let’s just say it’s one of the few remaining streets in London where I occasionally have to hold a scented hankie to my nose. This is because I have had a phobia about raw fish ever since I was 13 and went to Fleetwood docks on a school trip, had a massive panic attack and had to be taken back to the coach. Basically I can only cope with very polite-looking fish and Rye Lane is not polite. However, it does have a cinema where you can still see a blockbuster for a fiver. The Peckham Plex is notorious locally: the audience tends to get quite lively and I have regularly seen popcorn thrown at the screen.

Back in the early Nineties, when my friend Liza and I used to take the kids, we’d park in the multistorey car park round the back, which is now… not just a car park.

Peckham Levels is a space, a venue, a place where people can hang out and be creative. If you’re visiting for the first time (just follow any hipster type from the train station and they will lead the way), be prepared for the staircase, which is a glorious technicolour assault on the eyeballs. Yes, there is a lift, but I once had a traumatic experience in it – which is why I have never done car park lifts since.

Anyway, the staircase doesn’t smell of wee and ganja anymore. It smells of a brand new Peckham, which at the moment is mostly plaster board and concrete. This is a project in its infancy. To be honest, I wandered into areas where I should have been wearing a hard hat and you have to climb to levels five and six to get what the place is about, which is, well, a cool zone, an achingly hip space to gather and plug in a laptop and discuss projects over tables topped with succulents and pore over menus that feature ancho crema and whipped labne, which sounds a bit rude to me.

There is a big vegan vibe going on here, though meat and bao buns and so on are also available. I stumbled around the place like a great big middle-aged Alice, here a yoga studio, there a hairdressers’, everywhere young people artfully looking distressed. Soon there will be ceramics classes, music recording facilities, all those hopeful optimistic arty things.

It felt great and I also felt confused. I thought about sitting down but I couldn’t decide where. I was hungry but I didn’t know what “Umeboshi pumpkin salsa” was, so I tottered down the stairs and walked home. It was only when I got indoors and was halfway through a bowl of foul homemade soup that I realised I’d forgotten to take the cheque to the bank.