If London were to elect its own poet laureate then it would be hard to look past East End wordsmith Tim Wells and not just because he’s a big fella.

Wells’s carefully honed verse can appear bold, brash and lewd to the uninitiated or un-listening. But watch the man in action, listen with a pint in your hand or delve into his new collection Everything Crash and you realise that for every bog door joke there is a piece of classical inspiration. And for every mention of a reggae floor-filler there is a crafted observation so acute that you want to steal it as your own.

Judge by appearances and you’ll miss the button-down shirt-attired suedehead verbalist deliver lines in Yiddish, Sylheti, Cockney and Jamaican patois.

This is the sound of every London bus. The language, the banter, the bustle, the rows, the goth throwing up on the top deck at the end of a night out.

Wells is the voice of London old and new, equally at home dishing out broadsides on street markets, nightclubs past and the impact of gentrification as capturing the ebb and flow of migration or the life chances of today’s youth.

“I mean, when we were kids we didn’t have much, but we could still afford a pint and a game of football,” says Leyton Orient fan Wells. “There was still a bit of community. If you’re young now, where are you going to go? What are you going to do? A pint of beer in a lot of places, that’s a fiver now. You learn how to behave in pubs. Old people, young people, you watched them. You share ideas and you learn things, whereas now it’s like ‘well, I can’t afford that,’ so that whole thing of culture and ideas coming down isn’t really getting there, traded down the same way.”

Wells’s poems were meant to be performed and he does just that, racking up gigs every week in the pubs, poetry clubs and dives of London and beyond. The lines are written as he speaks, with the names of friends and family cropping up like this is a chat down the local, complete with the odd ribald remark. It’s hardly politically correct. But the politics are still spot on.

A poem on the 2011 riots speaks of the poor being swept away with the stiff brooms of the well-to-do. Another rails against regeneration-led soaring rents, as artists get into bed with property developers. The shame of being seen by mates in Wholefoods and the realities of shop work are in there too.

Often, Wells’s vignettes are like mini radio plays, as poignant and beautiful as they are brutal or belly laugh-inducing. Those chunky fingers can have a deceptively light touch.

“I think I’m quite conversational in how I write, also in how I perform,” he says. “I do write what’s around me, so a lot of this book is around gentrification in east London specifically. I think a lot of that is really a conflict between people and I’m very much on the side of people who are losing out. There’s nothing wrong with change. Change is inevitable, but you would hope that you would benefit from some of it and the fact is we don’t. I’m quite a fan of flat whites. Apart from that, I can’t think of a single thing gentrification has brought and you could train a monkey to make a flat white. Judging by some of the hipsters, they probably have.”

Wells has been writing and performing since the early 1980s, when he realised that standing on stage and blurting out a few lines was a way to get free gig tickets, free drinks and a chance to impress the opposite sex.

In the early days he found himself sharing a stage with the likes of Billy Bragg and the Redskins and he is now delving back to his formative years to create a history of what was then dubbed “ranting poetry,” resulting in his Stand Up and Spit blog and a number of high-profile poetry events featuring Mark Thomas, Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke.

“A couple of years ago I did a few interviews with some quite young poets and both of them asked me about the influence of hip hop on my work and I said ‘there isn’t one’,” he says. “I’m like, ‘well, yeah, there was spoken word before hip hop,’ which was a complete revelation. All the stuff we were doing was pre-internet, so, as far as they were concerned, it doesn’t exist. I thought it’s a good period to look at, because I think it does have a big influence on spoken word now and also I think there are a lot of links to be made there with what’s happening politically now.”

No-one can accuse Wells of being a nostalgic, though, as his writing and his poetry zine Rising are very much forward-looking. He has been publishing the zine since 1993 and regularly mixes the work of new or young poets with more established names, such as Cooper Clarke, Claire Pollard, Sean O’Brien and Phill Jupitus.

“I’m happy to say we’re the most defaced magazine at the Poetry Library,” says Wells. “It’s one of those things you either really like or you really hate. It’s everything to do with social class. When Rising’s good we don’t just have working-class writers in it, but I would say I favour working-class writers.”

Social class and a no-nonsense attitude may well be the reason that Wells has not yet secured his own Radio 4 slot. But then the BBC may just not know what to do with an outspoken working-class poet with an unaltered accent and a taste for the amusing side of popular culture. After all, the last talent from a similar background was Pam Ayres. She is one of the few poets that Wells is yet to perform with, although he would jump at the opportunity.

“It would be top of my list, I have to say,” he says. “This was a working-class woman making a living from poetry on the TV. She has always had that winning combination of a charming exterior with some quite smutty humour.”

Hopefully Wells will get to fulfil this ambition in the near future, but in the meantime he will be delivering his studied wit and words to literary festival fans, drinkers, and gig-goers across Britain. His rent may be going up, but his head won’t be going down. Not unless it is to check the shine on his neatly-tasselled loafers.

• Everything Crash by Tim Wells is out now, published by Penned in the Margins books at £9.99. www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk. You can find his ranting poetry history blog at standupandspit.wordpress.com.