Getting Found in East Dulwich: What the Data Actually Says

I run this business from Dulwich, so I get asked reasonably often what the search side of things looks like round here specifically. Usually the honest answer is that nobody publishes that, and people making local claims are guessing.

So I went looking for what actually exists. Council data, census figures, rail statistics, retail research, and one genuinely excellent high street study that almost nobody seems to know about. Here is what I found, what it means if you run something here, and where the data simply runs out.

Almost every business here is tiny

The single most useful fact about the local business base is how small it is.

• Southwark: 96% of businesses are small or micro. Southwark Council, Economic Strategy 2023 to 2030.
• Lambeth: over 90% are micro businesses, across roughly 13,000 enterprises. Lambeth Growth Plan, launched July 2025.
• Lewisham: 94.1% are microbusinesses with fewer than ten employees, with a further 5.8% between ten and 249. Lewisham's own economic strategy notes this is one of the highest proportions of micro businesses anywhere in London. Baseline dated August 2024.

Southwark also reports having welcomed 4,500 new businesses and grown its business base by 37% over the previous strategy period.

What that means in practice: your competition is not one big firm with a marketing department. It is dozens of businesses roughly your size, most of them with a website somebody built once and nobody has looked at since. That is a low bar, and it is worth knowing how low it is.

Lordship Lane, measured properly

In February 2015, Dr Charles Graham at London South Bank University ran a survey of eight Southwark high streets for the council: Peckham, Borough, Camberwell, Walworth Road, Lordship Lane, Herne Hill, The Blue and Nunhead Lane. Actual counts, on the pavement, on a Tuesday and a Saturday.

Lordship Lane came out as the most varied of the lot.

• 114 different businesses on the surveyed stretch, against an average of 80 across the eight streets. Over 40% more.
• 22 of 26 retail categories represented, with a diversity index of 0.85, the highest of any street in the study.
• 830 pedestrians an hour, 11,599 counted across the two days. Middle of the pack: Peckham ran at 1,900 an hour, Borough 1,600, Camberwell 1,100, Herne Hill 500.
• Saturday footfall was nearly three times Tuesday's, the sharpest weekday to weekend swing of any street surveyed.

The mix skewed towards food and drink at 30% of units against a 25% average, and mixed non-food retail at 31% against 25%. Groceries were underweight at 9% against a 17% average. Technology was at zero. Not one phone or computer shop on the entire street.

An important caveat: that survey is from 2015. I looked hard for something more recent, including Southwark's Authority Monitoring Report for 2023/24, the Dulwich Society and local press. Nothing. The council's current monitoring covers planning applications rather than vacancy or retail mix. So treat those numbers as a decade old and directionally useful rather than current.

The catchment is the interesting bit

The same study asked people where they had come from, and this is the part that matters most if you sell anything locally.

• 57% came from local postcodes. SE22 at 29%, SE15 at 17%, SE12 at 11%.
• 90% considered themselves local, either living or working nearby.
• 75% had travelled under 30 minutes.

It also found the visitors were noticeably more affluent and better educated than the Southwark average: 66% university educated against 55% across the survey, 35% in professional occupations against 20%, and 44% owning their home outright or with a mortgage against 31%.

When Lordship Lane shoppers went elsewhere, they went to Peckham (23%), the West End (15%), Lewisham (11%) and Brixton (9%).

A catchment that local changes what visibility means. You are not competing nationally for anything. You are competing to be the one that comes up when somebody a mile away, on their phone, needs what you sell today.

Money, and where it sits

Southwark's median household income was £43,800 in 2023, more than £3,000 below the London median. Source: CACI Paycheck Directory 2023, cited in Southwark Council's ward area profiles published February 2024.

But the borough average hides an enormous spread, and the Dulwich end is the top of it.

• South Southwark, the area covering Champion Hill, Dulwich Village, Dulwich Wood and Goose Green: £54,900.
• Dulwich Village ward: the highest of any ward in Southwark, more than £30,200 above the borough average, which puts it around £74,000.
• Champion Hill, by contrast, sits close to the borough and London average at £45,200.

Unemployment follows the same shape. Southwark's rate of claiming out-of-work benefits was 7% in 2021/22. Dulwich Village had the lowest of any ward in the area at 2.6%. Dulwich Wood had the highest locally at 6.1%.

Two wards, two miles apart, with very different customers. Worth remembering before you write a single line of copy aimed at "local people".

The population is not growing, but the traffic is

Goose Green ward, which covers the core of East Dulwich, had 13,610 residents at the 2021 census, up just 1% on 2011. Dulwich Village actually shrank 5%, to 10,250. Dulwich Wood grew 6% to 10,580, Champion Hill 4% to 9,580. The whole South Southwark area holds around 53,300 people, and has barely moved in a decade.

Movement through the area is a different story. East Dulwich station recorded 1.336 million entries and exits in 2024-25, up from 1.177 million the year before and 1.041 million in 2022-23. Source: Office of Rail and Road, published December 2025.

That is nearly 30% growth in two years. The residents are the same people. There are simply a lot more journeys.

One thing that changed in April

Worth flagging because it affects the maths for anyone with premises. The temporary Retail, Hospitality and Leisure business rates relief, which was 40% capped at £110,000, ended on 31 March 2026. From 1 April it was replaced by two new permanently lower business rate multipliers for properties with a rateable value under £500,000, cutting the multiplier by roughly 12p.

The significance is that this is a permanent structural change rather than another year of temporary relief. If you have been budgeting on the assumption relief might vanish, it no longer works that way.

What the search side actually looks like

Here I have to be careful, because this is where most local SEO writing goes wrong.

There is no credible, current, UK-specific research on how people find local businesses. I looked properly. The famous statistic, that most people who search locally on a phone visit a business within 24 hours, is a 2014 US study restated by Google in 2016, and the original is no longer easy to find. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey, quoted everywhere as though universal, samples 1,002 American adults. Their only UK version dates from 2010. Google's "near me" growth figures compare 2015 to 2017 and are US data.

So anyone telling you what percentage of your neighbours do what on their phones is repeating something they have not checked. I would rather say that than make one up.

What does exist, and is properly documented, is a June 2026 analysis of 979 UK local-intent keywords across 11 service sectors, pulled from Ahrefs by Studio36 Digital. It measures what actually appears on the results page:

The map results appear on nearly every local search in most sectors. A complete Google Business Profile and a properly built website do different jobs, and you want both working. The profile puts you in the map results. The website is what decides whether the person who sees you there picks up the phone.

The website earns its place at the next step, when somebody has seen you in the map results and clicked through to decide whether you are any good. That is where accurate, complete, machine readable information starts paying, both for Google and for the AI assistants people increasingly ask instead.

What all of this adds up to for a business in SE22

Four things, drawn from the numbers above rather than from received wisdom.

• Your audience is genuinely local. Nine in ten of the people on Lordship Lane consider themselves local. You are not fighting for national attention and you should not be optimising as though you were.
• Your competition is small and mostly not paying attention. When 96% of a borough's businesses are micro, very few of them have anyone maintaining their website. That is an advantage available to whoever bothers.
• The area is not one market. £74,000 in Dulwich Village and £45,200 in Champion Hill are different customers with different expectations, a mile and a half apart.
• Saturday is a different business from Tuesday. Three times the footfall. If your opening hours, your listings or your booking system do not reflect that, you are losing the busiest part of the week.

Where the data runs out

In the interest of not pretending, here is what I could not find, and what I would want if I could get it.

• Any vacancy rate, chain versus independent ratio or business count for Lordship Lane more recent than 2015.
• Borough level business birth and death rates for Southwark, Lambeth or Lewisham. The ONS holds them, but they render in interactive charts rather than as downloadable figures.
• Any south London specific footfall or vacancy breakdown. The British Retail Consortium and the Centre for Retail Research both publish at national level only.
• Any dated, methodologically transparent UK research on local search behaviour at all.

If you know of any of those, I would genuinely like to see them.

What I would do about it, and what it costs

Here is the part worth sitting with. Ninety per cent of the people on Lordship Lane consider themselves local, and the catchment is a mile or two wide. That means the person who needed what you sell was almost certainly within walking distance when they searched. If your site did not make it obvious enough for Google or an AI assistant to name you, they went to whoever it did name. You never hear about that. There is no missed call and nothing in your inbox, just a quieter week you put down to the weather.

I am in Dulwich, and I handle the whole technical side of being found as one job: SEO, AI search, answer engine and generative engine optimisation together. Site structure and crawlability so every page can be read. Structured data so Google and the AI assistants know exactly what you do, where you are and who you serve. Metadata, canonicals, sitemaps and crawler access, all set correctly. Then kept right every month, because your site changes and the standards move.

It is £100 a month. First month free, no contract, and you deal with me directly rather than an account manager. Start here, or email me your website address and I will tell you exactly what is holding it back.