This Grade II-listed building and grounds in the heart of Finchley was donated to the public by erstwhile owner Henry ?Inky? Stephens. It consists of the original Victorian mansion (Avenue House), plus a Gothic Revival-style lodge and stables and a large, quirky grounds and gardens.
Avenue House Grounds is a ten-acre (four hectares) Site of Local Importance for Nature Conservation on East End Road in Church End, Finchley in the London Borough of Barnet. The estate is now known as Stephens House and Gardens.
Avenue House is a Grade II listed Victorian villa dating from 1859 on a site previously known as Temple Croft Fields, named after the Knights Templar, who were granted 40 acres there in 1243. From 1312 to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, it was owned by the Knights Hospitaller.
During the Anglian ice age, around 450,000 years ago, ice pushed further south than at any other time in the past two million years. The area was then in a valley called the “Finchley depression”, which allowed a tongue of ice to push south to what is now the area north of the North Circular Road, near the southern extremity of any Pleistocene glaciation.