Understanding how large ecological communities persist and self-organise in space is a central, long-standing problem in theoretical ecology. Real ecosystems are spatially structured, and the distribution of species across space shapes their coexistence, stability and resilience, giving rise to phenomena such as pattern formation and segregation that homogeneous descriptions cannot capture. In this work we study a spatially extended generalised Lotka–Volterra model in which species both disperse and interact across space. We incorporate diffusion, which models the dispersal of individuals and tends to homogenise the system, together with non-local interactions mediated by a spatial kernel, which account for the finite range over which species compete for resources or influence one another.