Daniel Bell-Drummond talks of his ambition to climb into the Test top order as well as to develop cricket in low-income areas

Daniel Bell-Drummond does not get recognised much as he walks around his home streets in Catford, south-east London. In fact he does not get recognised – as the Americans say – period.

“No. Never. Only by my family, they recognise me,” he says, happy to lounge behind his cloak of invisibility in the gloomy depths of Rushey Green Costa Coffee.

A little later Bell-Drummond of Kent and England Lions will wander home along the thronging boulevards as teenagers in shorts and trainers drift past without a flicker of interest in the professional sportsman in their midst, not far from the spot where Liverpool’s Joe Gomez, another son of the Catford soil, was engulfed by a selfie-popping mob last year.

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Bell-Drummond is 24, an England regular through the age groups, and routinely lumped in among the most exciting young cricketers in the country. There is no doubt about his basic talent, as witnessed by a thrillingly poised 92-ball hundred against an Australia attack led by Ryan Harris and Mitchell Johnson at Canterbury three summers ago.

After a slow-burn couple of years in red-ball cricket he is on the edge of being on the edge of things with England, the next-best, almost‑but‑not-quite attacking right-handed opener in an era of a great many England openers.

For now Bell-Drummond’s anonymity in the area where he was born and grew up is significant in other ways. The dying back of the national summer sport to privileged minority pastime, something that takes place in the green spaces on the edge of town, is one of the hot topics in the game.

When it comes to urban areas such as Lewisham, with its population the size of Iceland, its low-income demographic, its lack of easy green space, cricket is an almost total absence. Joe Root, Ben Stokes and Alastair Cook could form a human pyramid and stroll through the shopping centre eating Polish deli sausage and skanking to reggae music from the CD stall next to Tesco and still fail to draw much of a crowd. Everyone agrees. Something needs to be done. But what?

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As an inner-city kid, and as one of only seven black or mixed race English cricketers now active across the 18 counties, Bell‑Drummond knows more about this than most. And it is here he starts to present another kind of story, and another kind of opportunity too.

The Platform initiative, launched this summer, is based on an original idea by Bell-Drummond. The intention is to bring cricket back into schools from which it has retreated, and in particular to re‑sew a passion for the sport among kids of Caribbean descent.

An after-school coaching programme began in the spring, driven on by the tireless work of cricketing outreach figures such as Chris Willetts, known locally for the 10-year project of ferrying kids in a minibus from Tower Hamlets through the Blackwall Tunnel to play at Blackheath, their only realistic chance of regular cricket.

Last week a selection of south London primary schools, from Ashmead in Brockley to Edmund Waller in New Cross, competed at a first inter-school festival day in Deptford Park, under the avuncular eyes of Bell-Drummond and Tymal Mills.

There is on the face of it nothing but good to come of this, although the initiative is yet to attract any support from the England and Wales Cricket Board, who you might have thought would leap at the chance. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Platform is the presence of current players in its midst. Does Bell-Drummond feel extra pressure in the professional side of his life given his own status as outlier, role model, and all-round bellwether of changing times?

“Yes, 100%,” he says. “I’m not oblivious to the fact I’m one of just a few black English cricketers in the county game. I’m proud of that to be honest. It doesn’t bother me on the pitch but when I go to bed I do think about it, I do know there are a lot of people rooting for me in these areas.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bell-Drummond with Ryan Ten Doeschate looks at the start of the MCC Champion County Match in Bridgetown, Barbados, earlier this year. Photograph: Randy Brooks/Getty Images for ECB

This narrowing has been a regular note of lament. England’s 1992 World Cup final team had two black players from the same London comprehensive, a state of affairs that is slightly mind-boggling now. Fast forward and there are only three black British cricketers under the age of 25 – Abi Sakande at Sussex, Liam Hurt at Lancashire and Bell‑Drummond – playing among the counties.

Bell-Drummond and Willetts are quick to stress there is no suggestion professional cricket has an obvious race problem. It is more that these are class issues to do with the sport’s own walling up within the private school system and behind the velvet rope of pay-TV.

“I haven’t experienced direct racism or had any bad treatment because of where I’m from or being black,” Bell-Drummond says of his playing days at Kent and beyond. “But I do think a lot of that is to do with the schools I went to. Going to Dulwich Prep and Millfield has played a massive part for me. Those are big advantages. It’s definitely more a class thing.”

Barriers come in more diffuse ways, obstacles Bell-Drummond himself was able to hurdle thanks to the efforts of his energetically hands-on Jamaican-born father.

“I was privileged growing up. There were a lot of kids who loved the game like me, had the same natural ability, but because of the schools I went to, because of my parents being able to drive me everywhere I had a massive natural advantage. Something I didn’t agree with is that a lot of those guys just didn’t have that chance.”

“We just want to see more diversity right down to club cricket, with more people from all backgrounds, not just Caribbean, coming in to clubs. You might not find the next Alastair Cook but ultimately we just want to get those people playing cricket and feeling they belong in it.”

This is a process Bell-Drummond has had to work through himself, from making hundreds aged seven in Kent junior cricket, to gaining scholarships to some of the nation’s most gloriously manicured boarding schools. An adolescence in the London Schools Cricket Association ranks helped speed his development. Millfield school provided a favourite junior coach and all-round early mentor in the shape of Mark Davies, a veteran of the Garner-Richards-Botham years at Somerset. Bell-Drummond ended up being named Wisden schools cricketer of the year.

A similar sustained glut of runs is required now to nudge his way up the list of hopefuls as Alastair Cook’s next piece of disposable arm-candy at the top of England’s Test order.

Test cricket, not the white‑ball stuff, remains the dream, an obsession formed during the early years spent marvelling at Brian Lara and Marcus Trescothick, childhood top‑order heroes.

“I’ve had my go with the Lions and done fairly well, mainly in white-ball cricket, but ultimately I think I’m more suited to red-ball cricket. I’ve been working on a few things and hopefully now I can get in the runs at the right time.”

Beyond this Bell-Drummond is that rare thing: an athlete with a nerd-level love of his sport, able to speak with real enthusiasm about the Nepalese Sandeep Lamichhane’s signing by the Delhi Daredevils, to offering informed early scepticisms about the concept of The Hundred, and a phlegmatic view on the slightly scary Twitter clips doing the rounds of Morne Morkel in action for the Surrey seconds, a bowler against whom Bell-Drummond would open next day in the Royal London Cup at Beckenham (he made 48; Kent won).

Best young English batsman around? Olly Pope. Best English spinner? Jack Leach. Quickest bowler in county cricket? Jofra Archer and Tymal Mills. “I can’t split the two. But Archer is more freaky, you don’t know where it’s coming from. He just jogs in with a really chilled action and suddenly the ball hits you.”

Platform is due to roll on for another year in south-east London. Before then Bell-Drummond will continue to press for his own case for the opportunity to become just the second black Briton to make a Test debut this century. Whether he makes it or not you get the feeling top‑order runs might not be the last of his gifts to the game.