Dulwich Hamlet

Lorraine Wilson, known to the club simply as 'Pa', put the team together in East Dulwich in 1893. The nickname followed naturally: 'The Hamlet', still worn today. What Wilson built took its most concrete form decades later in Edgar Kail, a forward who scored over 400 goals for the club and won an England cap in 1929 without ever turning professional.

Between 1920 and 1978 the club collected five Isthmian League titles and, earlier, four FA Amateur Cups, all won before 1937. Peter Crouch spent a season here in 1999–2000 before his career took him into the Premier League and the England side; he later returned to the club as a director.

The lease at Champion Hill nearly ended the club altogether. The ground's freehold was sold to developers in 2014, and by March 2018 Dulwich Hamlet had been served notice to leave. For a season they shared Imperial Fields with Tooting & Mitcham United, the club they now treat as their fiercest rivals in the South London derby, before returning to Champion Hill that December while terms were still being settled. Southwark Council resolved the dispute in July 2020, approving a redevelopment that paired a new stadium with 219 homes and handed the club a 125-year lease at peppercorn rent.

That security is recent enough that the club is still, in effect, settling back into a ground it once thought it had lost.