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Gypsies were a frequent feature of the sparsely populated Dulwich and Norwood woods before the 19thCentury, eking a living mainly through horse trading and fortune telling. Although there were a number of camps that surrounded the built up city, this was the most famous and well established, receiving a number of notable tourists. On August 11, 1668, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that his wife had visited “the gypsies at Lambeth”. The fact that they were there at all made them figures of curiosity, for in the 1560s they had been expelled from England under penalty of death, the reality being that expulsion only went as far as urban areas. Certainly they had something in the way of royal approval when in June 1750 George Bubb Dodington, the Whig politician and diarist, took the Prince and Princess of Wales and a large party “in private coaches to Norwood Forest to see a settlement of gypsies”. The eastern side of the road, as far south as Colby Road, along which lay a tributary of the river Effra, marked the western boundary of the Dulwich estate.
