Dulwich OnView
Dulwich OnView is a community online magazine and news site for Dulwich, the suburb in south-east London centred on Dulwich Village, East Dulwich and West Dulwich. Published at dulwichonview.org.uk, it carries local news, arts coverage, history and community features, and it holds an unusual place in British online publishing: it began as a volunteer-run blog magazine associated with Dulwich Picture Gallery, England's first public art gallery, and in 2010 it won the Museums and the Web Best of the Web award in the best small site category, an international recognition rarely given to a neighbourhood publication.
The magazine describes its purpose as celebrating people and culture in and around Dulwich. It is independent of the gallery whose community gave it life, run entirely by volunteers, and written largely by local contributors. Around two thirds of its content has historically had nothing directly to do with the gallery at all, covering instead the walks, pubs, parks, schools, festivals, shops and people of the surrounding streets. That mixture, part unofficial gallery companion, part parish magazine for the digital age, defines the title.
Origins at Dulwich Picture Gallery
Dulwich OnView emerged in the late 2000s through the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery. Ingrid Beazley, who chaired the Friends from 2005 to 2008 and worked in the gallery's education department promoting the use of technology, was concerned that the gallery's regular audience was narrow and that younger people in particular regarded it as old-fashioned and forbidding. At a local party she met Yang-May Ooi, who suggested using social media and blogging to reach a different audience and challenge that image, and from that conversation Dulwich OnView was born. Work associated with its development was presented at the Museums and the Web conference in Montreal in 2008, and a report on social media and museums appeared on the site in April that year.
The insight behind the project was simple and, for its time, novel. People who would never search for an art gallery would search for Dulwich walks, Dulwich history or Dulwich events. If a lively community magazine met those searches, readers would arrive for the neighbourhood and encounter the gallery along the way, following links through to its website. The gallery gained marketing and a warmer local presence at effectively no cost; the magazine gained status, a home community and a steady supply of cultural material. The relationship was described by those who studied it as symbiotic, and deliberately informal: the site could be personal and quick in ways an official museum website could not.
A volunteer community
Dulwich OnView is run entirely by volunteers and was formed in a grassroots manner through the Friends of the Gallery, with the gallery's support. Its editorial team was led by Ingrid Beazley and Shapa Begum. Contributors have included writers, photographers and film-makers from the local community, publishing articles, photographs, short films and podcasts, and a large number of guest contributors has always been part of the model. A gathering of its contributors at the gallery in 2008, photographed for the record, captures the scale of that volunteer base in its earliest days.
Beazley's own career gives the magazine further context. Based in the gallery's education department, she won nine national and international awards for her work there, and she later became a notable promoter of street art in Dulwich, work that grew directly out of the OnView community and is discussed below. She had studied art history and psychology, worked in schools in Singapore and Britain, and brought to the magazine an educator's instinct that participation, not broadcasting, builds an audience.
Content and character
The magazine is organised as a blog-based online magazine concerned with people and culture in Dulwich and the surrounding area. Its sections and recurring subjects include local news and reviews of arts events, local history, food and drink, health and fitness, walks, and the life of the Picture Gallery itself. Contemporary descriptions noted the range within a few posts: an explanation of a seventeenth-century painting, a fitness column, background to an art competition winner, and an interview with a film director connected to a local cinema event. New articles appeared roughly twice a week in its most active period.
Local history is a particular strength and a natural fit for a district with Dulwich's depth of story. Readers searching for the history of a street, a walk across Dulwich Park or the background to a local festival have long been a route into the magazine, and its archive functions as an informal local history journal as much as a news site. That archival quality distinguishes it from conventional local news titles, whose older stories lose value quickly; much of Dulwich OnView's material remains useful, and searchable, for years.
Platforms and method
From the beginning, Dulwich OnView used whichever social and publishing tools served its purpose. Its magazine itself was built on WordPress. Photographs by the local community were shared through Flickr. The Friends' film society, GalleryFilm, used a Facebook group. The magazine maintained a Twitter presence, and contributors produced podcasts and short films alongside written articles. Academics who studied the project in 2010 described it through the idea of a community of practice, a group bound together by shared activity and learning, and carried out a usability review in preparation for a redesign.
That redesign arrived in 2010, when the website was updated with multiple sections and a new style. The result was a more recognisably magazine-like publication, while the production method stayed the same: volunteers writing about the place they lived, coordinated by a small editorial team, published independently but in trusted association with the gallery.
The 2010 award
Shortly after its relaunch, Dulwich OnView won the best small site category at the Museums and the Web 2010 Best of the Web awards, announced in April 2010. The award mattered beyond Dulwich. Museums internationally were then debating whether social media and community content belonged in serious museum practice, and a volunteer-run neighbourhood magazine winning a professional web award became a cited example in that debate. Papers about the project were presented at Museums and the Web in Denver in 2010 and at the EVA London conference the same year, and commentators in the museum and public history world praised the site as a combination of fan site, visitor guide, local historical journal and community noticeboard, produced by people who plainly loved both the gallery and the place around it.
Street art and the Dulwich Outdoor Gallery
The magazine's most visible later chapter concerned street art. In 2012 Dulwich OnView published articles on the graffiti artist Stik after he produced works in Dulwich, work also featured by the Picture Gallery, in a collaboration in which Stik reimagined pictures from the gallery's collection in his own style on Dulwich walls. In 2013 the magazine reported on the Dulwich Street Art Festival, in which street artists created works based on traditional paintings in the gallery, forming the Dulwich Outdoor Gallery, a distributed collection of street art across the district by international artists.
Beazley established that outdoor gallery and later wrote a related book on street art, and worked with Google's street art project. The connection with Dulwich OnView is direct: a community magazine built to bring new audiences to Old Master paintings had helped create the relationships from which a street art festival, pairing those same paintings with contemporary wall art, could grow. Few local magazines anywhere can point to a physical transformation of their neighbourhood's streets as part of their record.
Dulwich setting
Dulwich gives the magazine rich material. It is a long-established residential district of the London Borough of Southwark, with a village centre, extensive green spaces and an exceptional cultural anchor in the Picture Gallery, founded in 1811 and commonly described as England's first, or oldest, public art gallery. A community publication in such a place can move naturally between gallery exhibitions, school and family life, independent shops, local societies and the history of individual streets, and Dulwich OnView's content reflects exactly that range.
Significance and legacy
Dulwich OnView's historical significance is threefold. First, it is an early, documented British example of a museum building its audience through a community-run publication rather than through official channels, studied and cited internationally while the practice was still new. Second, it demonstrated the durability of the volunteer community magazine as a form: local history, arts coverage and neighbourhood news, written by residents, organised around a place rather than a news agenda. Third, through its street art coverage and connections, it formed part of the story of how Dulwich's cultural identity developed in the 2010s, from gallery suburb to a district also known for art on its walls.
For a directory of online news, Dulwich OnView is best classified as it describes itself in practice: a community magazine and news site for Dulwich, in south London, volunteer-run, culturally led, and rooted in one of London's most distinctive neighbourhood institutions.
