Over the last two hundred years many Dulwich residents have been in the forefront of the food and drink industries. Bovril and the Vestey's meat business may be the best known but there are countless others ranging from brewers to lemonade and mineral water producers, and fish paste to mustard manufacturers. There were major names in sugar, ships biscuits, and tea, and there were also our restauranteurs, two of whom funded the English cricket team's first to tour Australia in 1861/62.

In 2017 Brian Green wrote: ‘In East Dulwich, when people walk down the street, there is a tendency to think all the houses look alike. But look closer and you’ll see they are not. There will be a row of houses with a group of four, a group of twelve or a group of twenty, and that is a clue that they were all built by different builders, and they’ll all have their own little architectural details.’

Based on research by local historian Julia Atkins in a small study area of East Dulwich, this talk 'looks closer'. It reveals a typology of the houses in the area, how they have been lived in, why and how they have survived and what is happening to them in the 2020s.

For generations, a red lamp on a Dulwich street corner was a sign of medical help nearby because doctors made themselves known by hanging them outside their houses, 90% of which were on street corners. This online talk by Dulwich Society Local History Chair Ian McInnes explores why medical practices clustered on corners, how patients found help after dark, and tells us the everyday history of medicine in Dulwich.